Two on Conan Doyle

BOOK REVIEWS achieved new styles, structures, themes, and genres" (my emphasis, 178). But he fails here or elsewhere to deal satisfactorily with these changing times and to explore what effect these changes might have had on the testamentary actions of the four authors. Perhaps this would have been beyond the boundaries Millgate set himself in this study. Within them he has achieved his goals admirably. W. Eugene Davis --------------------- Purdue University Two on Conan Doyle Harold Orel, ed. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Interviews and Recollections. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. xvii + 278 pp. $35.00 Harold Orel, ed. Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. xiii + 290 pp. $40.00 WITH THE PUBLICATION of The Collected Edition of A. Conan Doyle's Novels in 1904, an anonymous reviewer in the Athenaeum said, "Sherlock Holmes has so seized the popular ear that he almost alone of the abundance of men and women provided by living authors supplies a familiar reference used everywhere, an ineffaceable part of the English language." And Andrew Lang, reviewing the same edition in the Quarterly Review (1904), suggested that "Sherlock Holmes ... has become a proverb___" Since the first two Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of the Four (1890), were not especially popular, public fascination with the detective really began in 1891 with publication of the first Holmes short story in the Strand Magazine. It is astounding that only thirteen years later Holmes is called a "part of the English language" and "a proverb." Almost 100 years later these statements are still true. What kind of man could create such an enduring fictional character? Dr. Orel prefaces Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Interviews and Recollections with an incisive biographical sketch of Doyle. Then, after a few short autobiographical pieces by Doyle, Orel presents Doyle as his contemporaries saw him, gathering together articles from magazines and newspapers and excerpts from memoirs. Some are by literary figures like Bram Stoker, Jerome K. Jerome, James M. Barrie and Eden Philipotts, but most are by writers who are seldom read today. Orel identifies these, placing them in the literary, journalistic, political or 363 ELT 36:3 1993 military scene, and gives equally pertinent information about the people referred to in the articles and excerpts. In this collection a number of facts are repeated. It is noted at least seven times that Doyle's uncle, Richard Doyle, drew the original cover of Punch, and at least six times that Doyle's first published story, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley" (1879), appeared in Chambers's Journal. The diagnostic methods of Doyle's teacher at medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell, are almost always pointed out when the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes are mentioned. In the autobiographical selections it becomes obvious that Doyle himself had certain standard responses to questions and repeated a number of facts by rote when interviewed. Clearly Doyle felt his best literary endeavors were his historical romances Micah Clarke (1889), The White Company (1891) and Sir Nigel (1906) and hoped to be remembered primarily for these. All this repetition is somewhat monotonous though probably unavoidable when so many pieces are brought together. But Interviews and Recollections shows how much Doyle's contemporaries appreciated him both as a writer and as a human being. Orel's second collection, Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which combines contemporary comments and reviews with modern critical analyses, ranges more widely over time and provides more divergent points of view. The section on Holmes begins with Dorothy L. Sayers's "Dr. Watson's Christian Name," a witty example of what today is called Irregular scholarship. Logical and subtle arguments, bolstered with learned footnotes, establish the Scottish origins of Watson's name. Most of the contemporary reviews of Doyle's fiction, poetry, plays and nonfiction sampled in Critical Essays, like the comments in Interviews and Recollections, are pleasant generalizations with no in-depth appraisals . It is unfair, however, to expect Doyle's contemporaries to discuss the author and the Holmes stories in terms of sophisticated modern critical methods. Most reviewers praise Doyle for his characterization and accurate blending of historical fact with romance; a few...