« August 2008 | Main | October 2008 »
(Note: The Femmes Fatales are delighted to welcome guest blogger, Daniel Stashower! Daniel is a 
two-time Edgar winner whose most recent book is
The Beautiful Cigar Girl. He is also the co-editor of Arthur Conan
Doyle: A Life in Letters, which is now available in paperback. Dan, take it away!
)
I’ve spent more than a dozen years digging around in another man’s mail.
It started in Cambridge in 1994. I had gone there to look through a box of correspondence between Sir Oliver Lodge, the scientist, and Arthur Conan Doyle, about whom I hoped to write a new biography. I’d been expecting, when I asked to see the letters between the two men, that the librarian would bring me a set of smeary xeroxes. Instead, I found myself sitting with about a hundred original letters written in Conan Doyle’s own hand. I’d never held a real, live piece of Conan Doyle’s writing before. I lifted out the first letter and suddenly it came crashing in on me that I was handling a sheet of paper that had been touched by the man himself. This was the hand – perhaps even the very pen – that wrote “To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman,” and “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” and “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound.” By the time I finished, my hands were shaking.
Seven years later I found myself sitting in my office surrounded by file cartons filled with the man’s personal correspondence. By that time my biography had been published, and I had undertaken to edit – together with my esteemed colleagues Jon Lellenberg and Charles Foley – an annotated volume of Conan Doyle’s letters, most of them written to his mother over a period of more than 50 years.
And so I must pause to ask -- have you written to your mother lately? Conan Doyle wrote to his mother pretty much every day for half a century, sometimes more than once. There’s been a great deal of comment in recent years about the lost art of letter writing, and when you see a person’s life unfold in daily correspondence as we do here, you feel a palpable sense of loss that there won’t be a record of this type in our times. It’s not as if Conan Doyle crafted his letters for posterity -- he was forever saying “excuse scrawl” or “just a line in haste” – but that’s what gives them their sense of immediacy.
So there I was, surrounded by thousands of sheets of paper in no particular order, wondering how we were going to begin to make sense of it all. My wife, Alison, who loves clutter above all things, was quick to point out that the file boxes were taking up more space than our five-month-old son. Just then, my eye fell on a letter written in a childish hand. It proved to be one of young Arthur’s early letters home from boarding school at the age of 13. It read as follows:
We have had a great commotion here lately, from the fact that our third prefect has gone stark staring mad. I expected it all along, he always seemed to have the most singular antipathy to me, and I am called among the boys “Mr. Chrea’s friend.” Ironically, of course. The first signs of madness were at Vespers the other day. I was near him & I saw him, just as the Laudate Dominum began, pull out his handkerchief and begin waving it over his head. Two of the community took him and at once led him out. They say that in his delirium he mentioned my name several times.
I knew then that this was going to be a very unusual project. People are always asking if I have a particular favorite among the hundreds of letters we used in the book. It’s a tough call. There’s an especially funny one in which he describes the birth of his first child as if she had been a sudden and unexpected house guest:
She had no luggage with her, nor any possessions of any kind, barring a slight cough, and a voice like a coalman. I regret to say that she had not even any clothes, and we have had for decency’s sake to rig her out with a wardrobe.
Or there’s the one in which he talks about an ill-fated investment in coal from a newly-developed mine in southeast England:
It seems to have had the appearance and every other quality of coal save that it was incombustible, and when a dinner was held by the shareholders, to be cooked by local coal, it was necessary to send out and buy something that would burn.
If I have a favorite, it’s one that he wrote as a young, poverty-stricken doctor as he struggled to set up his first medical practice:
I took the most central house I could find, determined to make a spoon or spoil a horn, and got three pounds worth of furniture for the Consulting Room, a bed, a tin of corned beef and two enormous brass plates with my name on it. I then sat on the bed and ate the corned beef for a period of six days, at the end of which time a vaccination turned up. I had to pay 2/6 for the vaccine in London, and could only screw 1/6 out of the woman, so that I came to the conclusion that if I got many more patients I would have to sell the furniture.
I’ve been reading and studying Conan Doyle for most of my life, but that’s a voice I’d never heard before – warm, funny and intimate. It’s like being in the room with him. You don’t get that on email, more’s the pity. So when I’m done here I’m going to log off and write a letter to mother. I’m sure she’ll appreciate it – assuming she can tear herself away from Tetris 2000.