Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (46 page)

Red Pottage
(1899) is the novel which has lasted best. It features a duel, a guilty man’s self-destruction, and some sharp satire against religious cant. The last aspect of the work provoked denunciation from a London pulpit which delighted
the author.
Red Pottage
also has a revealing scene in which the heroine Hester’s antipathetic clergyman brother, James, discovers the manuscript of her latest work of fiction (she publishes her novels secretly and anonymously), for which she has received the promise of £1,000. The filthy thing reminds him of the novels of the detestable atheist, George Eliot, and he burns the only copy she has.

Cholmondeley went on to produce five novels in the twentieth century, one of which,
Prisoners
(1906), ran into libel trouble and irritated many of her acquaintance who discovered themselves portrayed in the work. In later life she subsided into silence, living with her sister Victoria in London and Suffolk.

Holmes takes my mind from better things.

Doyle was born in Edinburgh, one of nine children of an alcoholic father. An Irish artist turned Scottish civil servant, Charles Doyle was consigned, in later life, to a series of lunatic asylums. In the late 1970s a notebook surfaced whose lucid wit suggested that he may have been the victim of ‘wrongous confinement’. It was not an unknown resort of vindictive wives – divorce, Victorian-style. The novelist recorded little of his feelings about his luckless parent. A wealthy ‘lodger’ in the Doyle household – Dr Bryan Waller – slipped into the paternal (and possibly spousal) role, yet in none of his autobiographical writings does Doyle allude to the mysterious Waller, whose existence was uncovered by twentieth-century detective work.

Arthur Doyle (now additionally named ‘Conan’, later hyphenated, for a godfather with whom his relationship is obscure) was educated at the fee-paying Jesuit college, Stonyhurst. For the rest of his life he spoke with a pronounced Scottish accent and was ambivalent about religion. At sixteen he spent a year in Austria before enrolling at Edinburgh University’s medical school. He loved the Alps and would have been gratified by the modern pilgrimages by Holmes fans to the Reichenbach Falls.

His first story, ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley’, was published in 1879. In 1880 he spent seven months in the Arctic as ship’s doctor on a whaler. The following year he graduated, a ‘sixty per-cent examinee’ with a respectable degree, and
made another trip to Africa. After an unsuccessful experiment in partnership, he set up in medical practice at Southsea, near Portsmouth, in July 1882. His income had reached £300 a year by 1885, enabling him to marry the sister of one of his patients. Little is known of Louise Hawkins, other than that she had some money and may have nudged her husband towards spiritualism. A few years after the marriage she contracted tuberculosis which, although he was a trained doctor, Doyle did not diagnose until the disease was fatally advanced. He may have felt corrosive guilt at his oversight.

All through his early years at Southsea, Doyle had kept up his writing on the side and in 1886 played around with stories centred on an ‘amateur private detective’, called ‘J. Sherrinford Holmes’. The outcome was the Sherlock Holmes novella,
A Study in Scarlet
(1887). No top-drawer publisher would take it and it was eventually serialised in a magazine edited by Mrs Beeton’s husband. As usual with innovative works, the big-name publishers got it wrong. This mystery of double murder in Utah and London caught the public taste and Doyle followed it up with another Holmes adventure,
The Sign of Four
(1890). Doyle put something of himself into Sherlock Holmes but the sleuth was mainly inspired by a sharp-eyed teacher at Edinburgh, Dr Joseph Bell, a virtuoso at diagnosing illness by symptomatic ‘clues’, invisible to others. Early in 1891, Doyle submitted two stories to H. Greenhough Smith of the
Strand Magazine
. The editor reportedly realised ‘that here was the greatest short story writer since Edgar Allan Poe’. These Sherlock Holmes stories were devised to correct ‘the great defect’ in current detective fiction – lack of logic. They were illustrated by Sidney Paget, who supplied the detective with his trademark deerstalker and aquiline profile.

Doyle’s heart was never really in detective fiction. Holmes, he complained, ‘takes my mind from better things’. Nevertheless the stories were phenomenally popular in Britain and America and overshadowed everything else Doyle would ever write. In fact, his writing was extremely diverse. It includes such ambitious historical romances as
Micah Clarke
(1889), a story of the 1685 Rebellion and its defeat at Sedgemoor, told autobiographically by one of Monmouth’s humble followers.
The White Company
(1891), another historical romance, was the author’s own favourite work. The action is set in the Hundred Years War with France, and follows the exploits of a company of English bowmen. Doyle also invented the series heroes Professor Challenger (see
The Lost World
, 1912) and Brigadier Gerard. But, vary his game as he might, he was doomed to be the creator of Sherlock Holmes however much he chafed under it. In 1893, he killed the detective at the Reichenbach Falls, only to have to bring him back to life in 1901 and again in 1903.

Much as he came to hate him, Holmes made Doyle rich. With the aid of the
agent A. P. Watt, the novelist was earning as much as £1,600 a year by his pen in 1891, and by the end of the century was one of the richest of British men of letters. Doyle was a hearty man, loving cricket (he played for the MCC, and on one glorious occasion bowled out W. G. Grace), shooting and motoring – an expensive hobby which Holmes subsidised handsomely, as he did world travel and a country-house lifestyle. No pigging it in Baker Street digs for Arthur Conan-Doyle.
Rodney Stone
(1896) reflects Doyle’s enthusiasm for the manly art of pugilism. Set in the early nineteenth century, it introduces Beau Brummel and other historical notables into the action, and earned the author £5,000, a handsome purse. Above all, Doyle loved skiing. He picked up the enthusiasm in Davos (where his wife went for the sake of her lungs) and popularised the sport – enriching Switzerland even more than Holmes had enriched the
Strand
’s proprietor, George Newnes.

Louise Doyle was thirteen years dying. For ten of those years her husband was passionately involved with a woman almost young enough to be his daughter. Free at last, he married Jean Leckie in 1907, a year after the death of Louise. Doyle had children (with both Louise and Jean), but his relationship with them seems to have been remote.

Doyle was a convinced imperialist. During the Boer War he offered his rusty medical services to the armed forces and propagandised for the English cause. One of his anti-Boer ‘war pamphlets’ sold half a million copies. He was knighted by a grateful government in 1902. Doyle was similarly active as a patriotic front-line reporter in the First World War and made himself England’s foremost novelist-propagandist, along with Mrs Humphry Ward (whom he admired) and Hall Caine (whom he despised). He lost a son and a favourite brother to the Great War, which may have predisposed his cranky adherence to spiritualism in his last years.

All his adult life, Doyle was extraordinarily diligent as a writer to the press and attached himself to innumerable causes. Some, such as his defence of wrongly convicted criminals, were noble. His campaign to clear the alleged ‘horse slasher’, George Edalji, inspired a worthy act of literary
hommage
, Julian Barnes’s novel,
Arthur and George
(2005). Other causes – notably his crusade on behalf of the ‘Cottingley fairies’ – brought ridicule. Few writers have retained their posthumous popularity more bestsellingly. It is nice to think of his spirit (did such things, as Doyle believed, exist) slipping into a Leicester Square cinema to catch a showing of the 2009, Guy Ritchie-directed, Robert Downey Jr-starring movie
Sherlock Holmes
.

He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker.
Sherlock Holmes on his arch-foe, Moriarty

John Gardner’s final novel, the neo-Victorian
Moriarty
, ended a writing career far from where it started. The son of a clergyman, he served ‘with no distinction’, as he modestly recorded, as a Royal Marine commando, at the end of the Second World War. After the war, and study at Cambridge, he was persuaded by his father to enter the Anglican priesthood – but his career in the Church failed (‘Probably the biggest mistake I ever made’). He had been writing since the age of eight (when, as he records, he wrote on the first page of a notebook, ‘The Complete Works of John Gardner’), and his name as an author was launched in 1963 with the publication of
Spin the Bottle
– what members of Alcoholics Anonymous call a ‘drunkalog’. Of all the fifty-four books he published, it’s the one that most deserves to survive.

Gardner recovered from his addiction, and in 1964, created his serial hero, Boysie Oakes. Like Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer, Boysie was an anti-Bond: the Flashman of spooks. As Gardner admitted, towards the end of his life: ‘though I have denied it many times – he was of course a complete piss-take of J. Bond’. Ironically, in 1981 the piss-taker Gardner was commissioned to continue the 007 series, after Ian Fleming died inconveniently early. He performed the chore competently, although in later life he confessed that, powerful earner though it was, he had ‘never been really fond of J. Bond’. He was, however, fond of the two ‘Moriarty’ novels he published in the mid-1970s. Gardner had intended to write a trilogy, but the third volume (to be called
The Redemption of Moriarty
) was stalled by legal problems. It was finally written, a quarter of a century on, as
Moriarty
. Gardner was then battling with the cancer that would kill him while completing it.

Moriarty is Sherlock Holmes’s Blofeld. As the great detective explains in Conan Doyle’s ‘The Final Problem’ to his dim fellow lodger in 221B Baker Street, ‘He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.’ Gardner’s
Moriarty
kicks off with a conundrum which has tormented all died-in-the-wool Holmesians. How many Moriartys are there (Doyle indicates at least three: a professor, a Colonel, and a station master). And why are they all called James?

Gardner’s solution is witty and supplies the hinge on which his last novel swung merrily along. Of course, spoilsports will argue that Conan Doyle didn’t give a damn about such trifling details, thinking Holmes not worthy of it: ‘He keeps me from better things,’ Doyle famously complained. ‘There are no better things,’ Holmesians retort. In the final instalment, Moriarty has returned to London from some profitable master-criminality in the US to discover that his empire has been taken over by ‘Idle Jack’. Jack’s main source of income is supplying the metropolis with virgins from the Third World to sate the lust of English degenerates. Our less beastly crime lord’s reconquest of his turf is complicated by a traitor in his ‘Praetorian Guard’. Could it be the ‘evil Chinee’, Lee Chow, who can slice up a foe with his knife faster than you can say ‘chop chop’? Or Albert Spear, with the ominous ‘lightning scar down his right cheek’? Moriarty will find out. And yes, Moriarty will be redeemed.

Who will clean the soil?

The daughter of a Jewish, but religiously lapsed, artist and photographer, Hyman Davis, Julia Davis was educated at home by Mme Laura Lafargue, the eldest daughter of Karl Marx. She had eight siblings: one brother, James Davis (‘Owen Hall’ – a pun on ‘owing all’) was also a writer but, as his rueful pen name suggests, not entirely successful. Julia was successful. In 1883 she married a well-off wholesale cigar merchant, and minor poet, Arthur Frankau (d. 1904). It was the grand era of the ‘Havana’ and the couple lived prosperously on its aromatic fumes.

On their marriage, the Frankaus broke, formally, with Judaism. Julia began writing for the
Saturday Review
and, as ‘Frank Danby’, produced a novel,
Dr Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll
in 1887. The work, which was allegedly part written by George Moore, provoked indignation for its savage depiction of British Jewish life as philistine, money-grubbing and devoted entirely to the ‘Deity, Gain’.
Dr Phillips
, scandalous as it was found by those it principally wrote about, went through five editions in ten years, and fed the unthinking prejudices of the novel-reading middle classes.