Conan Doyle creates Sherlock Holmes

Some characters arrive in the world fully formed, walking out of their author's pen as if they had been waiting behind a door. The author, in such cases, is often the last to understand what has happened. He sits in a small room above a failing surgery, counts the week's takings, and reaches for fiction as a man reaches for a second trade. He does not know that the figure he has just drawn in pencil on cream foolscap will outlive every patient he ever sees, every cause he ever champions, every belief he ever holds dear, and will eventually outlive even his own name in the public mind. He has no notion that he is, in this hour, ceasing to be the principal occupant of his own biography.

THE PRACTICE AT SOUTHSEA

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, born at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, on the twenty-second of May 1859, is twenty-six years old in the spring of 1886, and his private medical practice at 1 Bush Villas, Elm Grove, Southsea, is not going to carry him through the year. The arithmetic is plain on the leather-bound day-book at his elbow: roughly one hundred and fifty pounds taken in fees against a three-hundred-pound annual cost in rent, drugs, gas, and the keeping of the brass plate polished. He is the son of Charles Altamont Doyle of the Edinburgh Office of Works, a draughtsman undone by drink, and of Mary Foley, who taught him to read the chansons de geste by the fire in Picardy Place. Stonyhurst gave him Latin and the Jesuits' habit of cold-water washing; the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, between 1876 and 1881, gave him the MB and the figure of Joseph Bell. In the four years since he came south, the bell above his consulting-room door has not rung often enough.

He has been writing on the side since his student days, short tales placed for three or four guineas in Chambers's Journal, in London Society, in All the Year Round; the fiction has paid perhaps thirty pounds a year, which is a supplement and not a living. What he needs is the novel, the bound book, the contract that pays in pounds and not in shillings. He has tried it once already, with a manuscript called The Narrative of John Smith, which the Post Office contrived to lose between Southsea and London, and which he could not bring himself to write again. The second attempt sits now on the writing-desk in the upstairs back-bedroom: forty-three thousand words in his careful clerk's hand, three weeks of evening work, the pencil corrections of tonight's pass still wet.

THE BACK-BEDROOM, MARCH 1886

It is twenty past nine on a Wednesday evening in March, the pale spring light long gone from the east window and the gas turned up to a yellow flame. The room is small: an iron bedstead, a washstand, a writing-table he carried up himself, the medical books from Edinburgh stacked along the skirting because there is no shelf for them. The street below is quiet; the lodgers downstairs have gone to bed. He has eaten cold mutton at six. He turns the manuscript to its cover page and reads what he has written there: A Study in Scarlet, being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., late of the Army Medical Department. The title pleases him. The word scarlet he has lifted from chemistry, from the colour reaction of haemoglobin to the reagent he was taught to mix in the Edinburgh laboratories; the rest he has lifted, frankly, from his own life, since Watson is a Netley-trained army surgeon back from Afghanistan and he himself is a ship's surgeon back from the Greenland whaler Hope, and there is not so very much daylight between them.

The detective is another matter. The detective he has built deliberately, as one builds a clinical case from the presenting signs. He has set him at 221B Baker Street, a number he chose because it sounded plausible and unfindable, and he has given him cocaine, the violin, the indolence between cases, the sudden ferocity of the chase. But the method, the method belongs entirely to Dr Joseph Bell of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, who in the out-patient hall of 1878 would look at a man across ten feet of waxed floor and say, before the patient had opened his mouth, that he was a left-handed cobbler lately back from the Barbados. The young clerks had laughed, the patient had stared, and Bell, by his own quiet account, had simply observed. The tan on the cheekbones, the wear on the trouser-knee, the calluses on the thumb. To a generation of Edinburgh medical students, Bell was the man who taught that diagnosis was a species of detection. It had occurred to Conan Doyle, sometime in the winter just past, that the reverse must also be true.

THE HINGE

He turns the lamp a little higher and writes on a fresh sheet the list of four publishers. The pen moves slowly; he is doing arithmetic at the same time. Cornhill, where James Payn sits in his editor's chair and reads novels for the Smith, Elder house: Cornhill is the prize, the address that makes a young writer's name. Blackwood's of Edinburgh, his own city, the magazine his father once subscribed to. Arrowsmith of Bristol, who paid Hugh Conway a thousand pounds for Called Back and made him famous in a season. And last, almost as a courtesy to the manuscript itself, Ward, Lock and Company of Salisbury Square, who publish the railway-shilling thrillers and the Beeton's Christmas Annual, and who are known among writers as the house that buys copyrights outright and never pays a royalty after.

He knows what he is looking at. The honest reading of the page in front of him is that Payn will keep the manuscript six weeks and decline it with a kind sentence; that Blackwood's, or perhaps Arrowsmith in Payn's place, will keep it another six weeks and decline it less kindly; and that by the autumn there will be one house left in the list, the house at Salisbury Square, and the offer will be twenty-five pounds for the full copyright in perpetuity. Twenty-five pounds is a quarter's rent on Bush Villas. Twenty-five pounds is the difference between staying in Southsea through the winter and writing his mother for help, which he will not do. A royalty contract on a first novel by an unknown Edinburgh doctor is, on the publishing-trade arithmetic of 1886, a thing that does not exist. He understands this perfectly. He has understood it since before he sat down to write. The question on the desk tonight is not whether he will accept the twenty-five pounds when it comes; the question is whether he will send the manuscript at all, knowing what the sending of it will cost him. To keep the copyright is to keep the detective; to keep the detective is to keep eating cold mutton on Wednesday evenings in Southsea while the brass plate goes ungreeted. He looks once at the medical day-book, with its column of unfilled afternoons, and once at the manuscript, with its forty-three thousand words, and he decides that the bird in the hand is worth more than the unhatched flock, and that he will sign whatever Ward, Lock put in front of him. He writes out the four envelopes. He addresses the first to Payn at Cornhill. He blows on the ink to dry it.

THE ROUND OF REJECTIONS

The manuscript went out to Cornhill at the end of April 1886 and came back at the end of May with a courteous note from James Payn, who said the tale was too long for a single issue and too short for serial, and who added, in his own hand, that the author should persevere. It went to Arrowsmith in June and came back in August unread, or at any rate unremarked. It went to Frederick Warne in September and came back in October with no note at all. It went to Ward, Lock and Company at Salisbury Square on the third week of October. On the thirty-first of October 1886, by letter signed G. T. Bettany for the house, the offer came back: twenty-five pounds for the copyright outright, publication deferred to the Beeton's Christmas Annual of 1887, no royalty, no reversion. Conan Doyle wrote at once to ask whether the house would consider, instead, a smaller advance and a percentage of sales. The house replied that it would not. He signed the agreement on the second of November and posted it back the same evening.

THE WAITING YEAR

The annual appeared in November 1887, a year and a month after the contract was signed, priced at one shilling, with A Study in Scarlet set in double columns between a comic Christmas play and a pair of advertisements for patent stove-polish. The initial press-run was about ten thousand copies and the issue sold out before the New Year. Ward, Lock reprinted the novel separately in 1888 as a cloth-bound volume at three-and-sixpence; they would reprint it again, and again, and again, in editions Conan Doyle never counted, and he received from those reprints, by the terms of the agreement he had signed in the back-bedroom at Bush Villas, not one penny. In the same months his sister Annette, who had been governessing in Portugal to keep their mother solvent, died of influenza at Lisbon. He closed the medical practice in 1891 and removed to London to set up as an eye-specialist on Devonshire Place, where, by his own account in the Memories and Adventures of 1924, he sat in his consulting-room day after day and not a single patient ever crossed the threshold. He used the empty hours to write the Strand stories.

THE STRAND, AND AFTER

The second Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four, was commissioned over a publisher's dinner in London in August 1889 by Joseph Marshall Stoddart of Lippincott's of Philadelphia, for one hundred guineas. Oscar Wilde was at the same table, and was commissioned at the same dinner to write The Picture of Dorian Gray; both novels appeared in Lippincott's of July 1890. The twelve-story sequence in the Strand Magazine, beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia in July 1891, ran the magazine's circulation from three hundred thousand to over five hundred thousand a month, and paid Conan Doyle thirty-five pounds a story. By the close of 1893 he was earning, on Holmes alone, a thousand pounds a year, and he had killed the detective at the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem of December 1893 because, as he wrote to his mother, the character was taking my mind from better things. The public would not let him keep the detective dead. He brought him back in The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901 and in The Adventure of the Empty House in 1903, and he wrote Holmes stories for another quarter-century after that, in total four novels and fifty-six short stories, none of which paid him a shilling on the copyright of the first.

THE LONG VIEW

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, knighted in 1902 for his pamphlet defence of the British conduct of the South African War, died at Windlesham, Crowborough, in Sussex, on the seventh of July 1930, in his seventy-second year. He spent the last fifteen years of his life as the chief lay advocate in the English-speaking world of spiritualism and the survival of the personality after death; he lectured on the subject in four continents and lost, by his own estimate, a quarter of a million pounds in the cause. He is buried, since the family's removal of the grave in 1955, in the New Forest churchyard at Minstead in Hampshire, under a plain oak headstone that gives his name, his dates, and the single word Steel True. The Sherlock Holmes copyrights lapsed by stages between 1980 and 2000 and the character has since been adapted in over two hundred and fifty films, more than any other fictional human being in the history of cinema.

Some characters, once written, no longer belong to the man who wrote them. They walk out into the long traffic of the world, and the world takes them up, and the author becomes a stage in their passage, a hand that held the pen for a single year in a small upstairs room. In the back-bedroom at 1 Bush Villas the desk is gone, the gas-bracket is gone, the cream foolscap is gone; the building itself was destroyed by German bombing in January 1941. What remains is a brass-plated number on a door that was never built, on a street that does not exist, in a city the doctor barely knew: 221B Baker Street, where the detective is always at home, and the doctor, in the second-floor sitting-room, is always just back from the war.