SuperHeroBooks - The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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List Price: $30.00
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Manufacturer: Free Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN: 9780743275231
ISBN: 0743275233
Label: Free Press
Manufacturer: Free Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 576
Publication Date: 2007-12-18
Publisher: Free Press
Studio: Free Press
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great biography
Comment: Have followed Sherlock Holmes for over 40 years. I learned new things from this book. Very happy with it. Recommended it to local librarians.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Satisfying Biography, But Perhaps Not for Sherlockians
Comment: A biographer looking to paint the full life of the subject must necessarily dig into areas of the subject's life that may not be of much interest to the typical reader. In the case of Arthur Conan Doyle, who quickly moved beyond medicine to become one of the more prolific of Victorian-era writers, and one of the most successful, there is a lot of ground to cover.
Yet, for most of us today, all we really care about is Doyle's great creation, Sherlock Holmes. Doyle's many historical novels, books about spiritualism, plays and poetry are today generally forgotten. Without Holmes, Doyle would have been a cipher in the history of literature.
Andrew Lycett's biography is thorough-going, clearly well-researched and, for someone trained at Oxford, well-written. Its critical fault, for me at least, is that it treats Doyle's great creation as just another part of the author's large output.
Who cares about The Story of Mr. George Edalji (1907)? Who cares about The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921)? Who cares about The History of Spiritualism (1926)? Or about a dozen or two other now-forgotten tomes?
We want to know all the juicy Sherlockian details. We want to know every detail about how Dr. Doyle came up with one of the most original characters in literature. We want to know what he thought of his creation. We want to know how each story evolved. This Andrew Lycett fails to give us.
This is a biography that covers everything about the long and generally happy life of Arthur Conan Doyle without, despite the title, fully satisfying our sweet tooth for information about Holmes and Watson, the only thing that really matters in the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
--Lan Sluder
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Summary: More About the Man Than His Work
Comment: If you're looking for the creative process that Conan Doyle employed in memorializing perhaps the most famous fictional character in literary history, this book will disappoint. Other than the well-known fact that Joseph Bell was the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes and that Conan Doyle needed to supplement his meager medical practice with additional funds, this book is more of the chronolgy of the life of a man who lived a rather mundane, if somewhat, typical Victorian existence.
True, his father was an alcoholic and Conan Doyle's first wife was practically an invalid the last ten years of her life causing him to initiate an adultrous affair with a woman who would later become his second wife; however, much of the book simply relates the travels, associations, business ventures, family squabbles and misunderstandings that were conventional to that period. Andrew Lycett, the biographer, admits in the Afterword that getting to know Conan Doyle up close and personal was difficult due to the heir's reluctance to release certain documents and letters. Following Conan Doyle's death, there was a real donneybrook over who got what from the estate. Greed and jealousy ruled and posterity and Conan Doyle's legacy has suffered because of it.
For my part the image of the man is forever tarnished by his obsession with the occult, paranormal, and spiritualism. Apart from Sherlock Holmes, he failed to live up to what he could have achieved in his lifetime as an author of great promise had he not been fixated with contacting the dead. His misguided intentions to divest himself of the true Christian faith marred a life that brought untold satisfaction to tens of thousands of devoted readers.
With that as a personal aside, Lycett from all accounts has written the most definitive biography to date on the life and times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
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Summary: The Man Who Was Wanted
Comment: Lycett takes complete advantage of recently released family papers, and although at first glance they seem largely like household account books that reveal how much money was spent on this and that in any given period, soon this accumulation of data grows a fascination of its own. We can see through a myriad of details how Conan Doyle, by his own literary labors, started out with nearly nothing and wound up one of the wealthiest writers of his day, living life in a nearly baronial fashion with everything he could dream of. Was this affluence worth the price he paid for it? In some ways, Lycett argues, he was completely happy and very much a man of his time, but his growing spiritual instincts show, some have argued, a guilt consciousness overtaking him, making his soul restless as those whose peregrinations through ectoplasm he studied night after night, the victim of some of the worst frauds the world has known.
I enjoyed the biography, though it is superlong and at the same time, rushed during the second half of Doyle's life, where so many things happened to him that Lycett's chapters devolve into mere laundry lists of "And then he," "and then he," without much analysis. But by then he has given us ample evidence with which to judge Doyle's character. I suppose no biography of the man could fail to examine his mysterious second marriage, and when the love affair between ACD and Jean Leckie began. They always put up a public front, as did their children, that no way did anything untoward occur between them while the first wife, tubercular Louise, was still alive. Lycett takes a middle ground, referring to Jean as Conan Doyle's "mistress" even while accepting that perhaps there was no sexual activity between them. It must have been a trying time for Jean, not to mention Louise! And much of ths strain fell on Louise's two children, Mary and Kingsley, whom Jean seems to have resented terribly and who she made sure were always being sent away to school or to spend their vacations far away from wherever she was. Conan Doyle comes off as sort of a man torn in two, but Jean seems just horrid in every way.
Lycett finds echoes of this central conflict in many of Conan Doyle's stories and novels, pointing to the way that the author of the Sherlock Holmes tales withdrew "The Cardboard Box" from a proposed volume of "Memoirs," even after it had been published in periodical form, because its tangle of illicit love affairs reflected too much of the lustful drives he himself was feeling but had, as a Victorian paterfamilias, to keep a dark secret.
Lycett ignores the current controversy about the authorship of THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES and does not so much as refer to the possibility that Conan Doyle had Fletcher Robinson "bumped off," though he does spend a lot of time, particularly in what is otherwise a very rushed account of Doyle's final 20 years, on his putative involvement in the Piltdown Man hoax. In his analysis of the George Edalji case, he shows us rather humorously that Conan Doyle's championing of the wrongfully imprisoned Edalji had many roots, not just the simple one of wanting justice done, including the fact that a fellow clubman had managed to clear a wrongfully accused man just the previous year and perhaps ACD wanted some of the glory too! All in all, a splendid book and one that will be much discussed in the years to come.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Real Holmes, The Real Doyle
Comment: A case could be made that the most famous character in fiction is Sherlock Holmes. Everybody knows him, if not from the original stories, then from the countless plays, movies, and parodies. There is an international fan club, and the great detective still gets mail at his 221B Baker Street address in London. But his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was not so enthusiastic. Surely Holmes was the making of Doyle as a literary man, but six years after Holmes first appeared, Doyle wrote in 1892, "I am weary of his name." The public enthusiasm over the detective was, in Doyle's view, keeping him from writing the better things for which he wanted to be known, among which were his books and pamphlets in defense of the new religion of spiritualism. He failed in many of his non-Sherlockian efforts, and thus his most recent biography is called _The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle_ (Free Press) by Andrew Lycett. The author has made a specialty of literary biographies (Ian Fleming, Rudyard Kipling, Dylan Thomas) and has had a long battle with the complicated network of Doyle heirs (described here in an afterword) to produce a big and detailed portrait of a gifted and deeply conflicted author.
Doyle was born in 1859 in Scotland, of Irish parents. He was all her life devoted to his "Mam", perhaps excessively even by Victorian standards. Many of his words quoted here are from letters to her. His father was insane and an alcoholic, incarcerated for years in mental institutions. Doyle abandoned his family's Catholicism and as a young man claimed agnosticism at a time when the term and the idea was a new one, before eventually claiming spiritualism. Though Lycett covers Doyles other literary works, it is Sherlock who will always be most important. Doyle killed Holmes off and remained a popular author without him, but not as popular and not as wealthy, and the reading world rejoiced to learn that Holmes's death was only apparent, not actual, when the stories resumed. Lycett writes, "Becoming a spiritualist so soon after creating the quintessentially rational Sherlock Holmes: that is the central paradox of Arthur's life." Lycett has examined the paradox thoroughly, but probably it can never be fully explained. Doyle never mixed spiritualism into the Holmes stories. When Holmes encountered superstition, it was always with the understanding that there were rational, material explanations for what people had misinterpreted as the doings of the supernatural.
Lycett's book is excellent about Doyle's literary efforts and his eagerness to involve contemporary concerns into his fiction, even if he was careful not to mix his spiritualism with his famous detective. Lycett's extensive investigations into newly-available archives mean that we can know Doyle's whereabouts, budgets, and enthusiasms with sometimes day-to-day accuracy. Doyle was an anomaly in many ways, supporting and uprooting conservative British ideals in different spheres, and Lycett has done justice to his many non-literary interests. It is as the creator of his famous detective, however, that he must always be best remembered, and the many Sherlock fans will find a treat in this a detailed, far from elementary biography.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's name is recognized the world over, for decades the man himself has been overshadowed by his better understood creation, Sherlock Holmes, who has become one of literature's most enduring characters. Based on thousands of previously unavailable documents, Andrew Lycett, author of the critically acclaimed biography Dylan Thomas, offers the first definitive biography of the baffling Conan Doyle, finally making sense of a long-standing mystery: how the scientifically minded creator of the world's most rational detective himself succumbed to an avid belief in spiritualism, including communication with the dead. Conan Doyle was a man of many contradictions. Always romantic, energetic, idealistic and upstanding, he could also be selfish and fool-hardy. Lycett assembles the many threads of Conan Doyle's life, including the lasting impact of his domineering mother and his wayward, alcoholic father; his affair with a younger woman while his wife lay dying; and his nearly fanatical pursuit of scientific data to prove and explain various supernatural phenomena. Lycett reveals the evolution of Conan Doyle's nature and ideas against the backdrop of his intense personal life, wider society and the intellectual ferment of his age. In response to the dramatic scientific and social transformations at the turn of the century, he rejected traditional religious faith in favor of psychics and séances -- and in this way he embodied all of his late-Victorian, early-Edwardian era's ambivalence about the advance of science and the decline of religion. The first biographer to gain access to Conan Doyle's newly released personal archive -- which includes correspondence, diaries, original manuscripts and more -- Lycett combines assiduous research with penetrating insight to offer the most comprehensive, lucid and sympathetic portrait yet of Conan Doyle's personal journey from student to doctor, from world-famous author to ardent spiritualist.
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