A Study in Creativity
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
by Richard Pooley
The family call it “The Birth Certificate”. It is a single page torn out of a red notebook, one of many kept by their ancestor, a doctor in Southsea, England. In them he used to scribble notes about events – April/Engaged…Aug/Married (these in 1885) or any matter which puzzled, amused or inspired him – Geo IV spent his wedding night drunk across the grate. Why? Because he was also trying to earn some money by writing. A doctor in Victorian times had to canvass for patients and there were not many able to afford medical treatment in the back streets of Portsmouth and Southsea.
No doubt you have guessed who I am writing about: Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, the most portrayed fictional human character in film and TV according to the Guinness World Records. And this page is the most important of the ones in which, in early 1886, Doyle prepared to write his first Sherlock Holmes novel: A Study in Scarlet. It’s a fascinating study in how an author, or anybody creating something new, arrives at his invention. It’s never straightforward. There are many iterations, stop-starts, zig-zags and crossings out (literal as well as metaphorical).
Take the title. On an earlier page Doyle wrote a tangled skein. A skein is a length of wool or thread wound into a coil. Think of the last time you tried to unwind a rolled up piece of string or that thin cable of Christmas Tree lights you wound up eleven months ago and ended up furiously untangling. The detective is often in the same position, trying to follow various complicated and intertwined lines of enquiry. Doyle decided to change this to A Study in Scarlet. At the end of Chapter 4, Holmes says: “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”
Perhaps you might expect Doyle to have written out a plot. Well, earlier pages have jottings on potential scenes, comments on books he’d read – e.g. five by Turgenev (spelt Tourqueneff) and a description of the physique and observational methodology of Dr Joseph Bell, the lecturer on surgery at Edinburgh University’s Royal Infirmary, on whom Doyle based Holmes. But no real plot.
What he focused on were his two main characters: Holmes and Watson. Except the first name under the title is Ormond Sacker followed by from Soudan from Afghanistan. Imagine if Doyle had not changed Ormond Sacker to John Watson.
In an article in Only Connect some years ago I wrote this: “Holmes is the cold, rational problem-solver who thinks laterally and remembers only what is useful to him. Watson is the warm, intelligent Everyman who thinks linearly and unimaginatively… The differences and tensions between Holmes and Watson are crucial to the success of the stories and novels…”
Doyle must have realised that no British Everyman could be called Ormond Secker. He admired Charles Dickens enormously but, in a speech in 1921 he said of him: “…if he had dropped all the Turveydrops and the Tittletits and the other extraordinary names he gave to people, he would have made his work more realistic.”
Doyle in his memoirs stated that Holmes “must have a commonplace comrade as a foil – an educated man of action who could both join in the exploits and narrate them. A drab, quiet name for this unostentatious man. Watson would do.” Bye, bye Ormond Sacker.
Next is Lived at 221 B Upper Baker Street. Doyle hardly knew London. The story goes that he had a Post Office map of the city and simply stabbed a finger onto it. Note that the Upper didn’t make it to the book. In fact, the street’s numbering in 1886 didn’t go above the 90s.
And then: with
I Sherrinford Holmes –
So, here he, nearly, is. On a previous page he had been Sherrington Hope.
The weird world of Sherlockian ‘scholarship’ is full of people who have spent far too much time trying to establish how and why Doyle settled on the moniker Sherlock Holmes for his hero. I have not joined them. Suffice to say that Doyle was a great admirer of Oliver Wendell Holmes, the US American doctor turned poet and humourist. And despite all the conjecture – e.g. a classmate at his school was called Patrick Sherlock – is it possible that Doyle was drawing on his Irish heritage? His mother, to whom he wrote almost weekly until her death in 1920, came from Lismore, County Waterford. Sherlock (Ó Scurlóg in Irish) is a common given name and surname in that part of Ireland. As, by the way, is Ormond and Moriarty.
You will have noted that Doyle is assuming at this stage that Holmes will be writing his own story. There is a line drawn from I Sherrinford Holmes – to
Reserved –
Sleepy eyed young man – philosopher – collector of rare Violins
an Amati - Chemical laboratory
I have four hundred a year –
I am a Consulting detective –
Yet before all this Doyle had written The Laws of Evidence. Was he about to write down an explanation of his “methods” of deduction? If so, he got distracted by his description of Holmes. The page is a tangled skein indeed.
Sleepy eyed is strange. Did Doyle consider Holmes a dreamer? He had previously described Bell as being sharp-featured and having a piercing gaze. And by the time Doyle got to writing Chapter 2 of the book Watson was describing Holmes as having ”sharp and piercing” eyes; although there were several days when Holmes would lie on the sofa with “a dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes.”
Why did Doyle decide that Holmes would have an Amati violin? Even rarer and therefore more prestigious than a Stradivarius? In A Study in Scarlet Watson says Holmes “prattled away about Cremona fiddles, and the difference between a Stradivarius and an Amati.” But it is the former which he appears to have favoured.
£400 a year in 1886 is equivalent to around £67,000 ($90,000) today. Doyle was 27, recently married and struggling to make money when he wrote this. He had known genteel poverty when growing up (his father was an alcoholic, his mother took in lodgers to pay the bills, and his rich uncles paid for his education at Stonyhurst College). He had compressed each year of his studies at Edinburgh University into six months and spent the other half-year working as a medical assistant to doctors across England or, for a few months in 1880, earning £50 on a whaling ship in the Arctic. He had also written stories for magazines and been thrilled to receive three guineas (£1 and 1 shilling) for one - The Mystery of Sasassa Valley. So, £400 as Holmes’ annual income must have seemed ample to the poor doctor. Yet how did the Consulting detective pay for those violins? And why did he often appear to waive his fee? And when did Dr Watson have time to earn money?
The page of notes finishes with a piece of dialogue, though it is not clear when Holmes becomes Doyle. Are these The Laws of Evidence?
What rot this is” I cried – throwing the volume petulantly aside
“I must say that I have no patience with people who build up fine theories in their
own armchairs which can never be reduced to practice –
Lecoq was a bungler –
Dupin was better. Dupin was decidedly smart – His trick of following a train of thought was more sensational than clever but still he had analytical genius.
Lecoq was a detective in three books by Émile Gaboriau (1832-1873). In fact, Doyle was an admirer of Gaboriau. Indeed, it was in Gaboriau’s The Mystery of Orcival (1867) that Lecoq says “The difficulty is to seize at the beginning, in the entangled skein, the main thread which must lead to the truth through all the mazes, the ruses, silence, falsehoods of the guilty.”
Dupin was the creation of Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) who Doyle also greatly admired. In 1894 Doyle told American reporters: “Dupin is unrivalled. It was Poe who taught the possibility of making a detective story a work of literature.”
Doyle began writing A Study in Scarlet on March 8, 1886 and had finished it by the end of April. Such speed was typical of Doyle when preparing and writing his Sherlock Holmes stories. He thought his historical novels had much greater literary merit and spent a lot of time making sure he had got every detail correct. Two of the goals of Sherlockian scholars appear to be, first, to point out the many mistakes and inconsistencies in the text and, second, to try and explain why they may not be errors after all. Fun for them but really Doyle simply didn’t care overmuch about accuracy when writing these stories.
I recently came across a postcard among the papers of his literary agents, A P Watt & Sons. It’s undated but must have been written to Watt by Doyle in 1926:
“No. 5 is done – Adventure of the Veiled Lodger. Did it in one day with 18 holes of golf thrown in which is not bad for 67.”
For me there is only one mystery about these and other preparatory notes that I am aware of. Where are the plots? Did he just keep them in his head? Perhaps this explains the errors and, frankly, the weakness of the plots in many of the last stories. My step-grandmother, Dame Jean Conan Doyle, used to tell me that as a young teenager she was asked by her father to come into his study (out of bounds to her brothers) and help him devise the storylines.
The creative accomplishment of Arthur Conan Doyle was the bringing into being of Sherlock Holmes and one of the strangest yet strongest friendships in literature.
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