I was now once more at a crossroads of my life.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES
In late 1889 a young Englishman named John Coulson Kernahan had joined Ward, Lock & Co. as a junior editor. The author of a quirky meditation on mortality in the form of a novel, A Dead Man’s Diary: Written After His Decease, Kernahan was helping Frederick Locker-Lampson edit a new edition of his popular anthology Lyra Elegantiarum: A Collection of Some of the Best Social and Occasional Verse by Deceased English Authors, and would go on to write popular novels such as The Child, the Wise Man, and the Devil, as well as a fictional prediction of coming war with Russia, The Red Peril.
As junior editor at Ward, Lock, he quickly had ideas. Kernahan was also assistant editor of the U.K. edition of Lippincott’s, and the February 1890 issue, which was about to go on sale, would feature the complete text of The Sign of Four, commissioned the year before by J. M. Stoddart. Later Kernahan said that he found the issue of Beeton’s in which A Study in Scarlet had appeared barely more than a year earlier, and took the red-yellow-and-black volume to the managing director, James Bowden.
“Is there anything being done with this?” Kernahan asked.
Bowden shook his head. “It served its purpose, and did respectably as the Annual.” He pointed out that the sales of the first book edition the year before were not impressive, however. “And few reviewers had anything to say of it.”
“No,” Kernahan admitted, “so many books appear at Christmas that reviewers are not likely to write at length, or even to notice the contents of one of the many Christmas annuals.”
A Study in Scarlet, however, had been the work of an unknown writer. Times had changed, Kernahan insisted. This man Doyle had since published a historical novel, Micah Clarke, and here Lippincott’s was about to publish a second Sherlock Holmes novel. “I am as sure as one can humanly be,” Kernahan claimed that he insisted, “that there is a great future for stories in which Sherlock Holmes figures. As you have A Study in Scarlet, the very first story about Sherlock Holmes, I suggest that you reissue it as a book, by itself, attractively produced, and attractively illustrated.” He made a prediction: “I believe it will have a huge sale, and go on selling for years.”
Finally the director agreed.
The Sign of Four appeared in England and the United States simultaneously, in both editions of the February 1890 issue of Lippincott’s. In England Arthur’s contract with Lippincott’s gave the magazine three months of exclusivity. After that period expired, the novel was reprinted in various English periodicals, beginning with the Bristol Observer from May to July, followed by the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, the Birmingham Weekly Mercury, and others. On the seventh of June, and again on the fourteenth, the Bristol Observer printed unsigned illustrations of the novel that portrayed Sherlock Holmes wearing a deerstalker hat. In his text Arthur had not mentioned such a hat, but the illustrator was not afraid to take liberties; he also adorned Holmes with a small dark mustache.
The deerstalker, made of tweed with a bill in both front and back, had been nicknamed the “fore-and-aft cap.” Deer stalking was not quite the same as deer hunting, which in England referred to unarmed gentry riding after trained deer hounds. Stalking was the term for more solitary armed hunting, especially for selective culling of herds of fallow, roe, and other deer for game management. A new Handbook of Deer-Stalking had been published as recently as 1880. The deerstalker’s design not only shielded both the face and the back of the neck; most variations also had flaps that could be pulled down to cover the ears. It was strictly rural headgear. The Bristol Observer artist, however, portrayed Holmes wearing the hat in Westminster and along the Thames.
* * *
“A most interesting man to talk to,” one of Charles Doyle’s asylum attendants noted on January 20, 1890. Charles seems to have never lost his charm. But the same medical record noted that Charles was not sketching as often as he had formerly, and that the quality of his drawings had greatly deteriorated.
Three days later, Charles was transferred to the Royal Edinburgh Asylum. He had been in Montrose for almost five years. Institutions often transferred patients after a few years, partly in the hope that they might find a change of staff and setting invigorating. The General Board of Lunacy described Charles’s condition as “relieved,” and stated that he was suffering not only from alcoholism but also from epilepsy and deteriorating memory.
The Royal Edinburgh was on an estate in Morningside, in southwestern Edinburgh. In a way, Charles was going back home, but his family was scattered far afield, so Charles was no less alone than he had been at Montrose. His new setting was much larger, with twice as many patients. Under director Thomas Clouston, the Edinburgh Royal Asylum was expanding and modernizing. Originally opened in 1813 as the Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum, it had been launched with parliamentary funds derived from punitive fines from the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. There was a large building for charity patients as well, but Charles’s family could afford his £42 annual fee. After he was examined at the new facility and the staff realized how poor his memory was for recent events in his life, Charles was admitted with a new diagnosis: “epileptic insanity.”
Geographically, Charles was a long way from Arthur’s busy life in Southsea, but he was often on Arthur’s mind. The son suffered a tumult of emotions about his father—love, pity, shame, anger—and they showed up in his fiction. In December 1890, each weekly issue of Chambers’s Journal carried an installment of Arthur’s long story “The Surgeon of Gaster Fell.” In it the narrator suspects his neighbor, a surgeon, of trapping an elderly man in a cage, apparently for the sake of some dark experiment. But the story turns out to be the sad narrative of a family looking after their troubled father; the cage was an alternative to a fate the old man would have considered worse. “He has an intense dread of madhouses,” revealed the surgeon in the story’s closing note, “and in his sane intervals would beg and pray so piteously not to be condemned to one, that I could never find the heart to resist him.” When this story was reprinted years later, Arthur deleted this too-revealing remark, but he left the fictional date of the story as 1885—the year that Charles Doyle had turned violent and been transferred from Blairerno’s easygoing home for inebriates to Montrose’s secure asylum for the insane.
Eleven months later, in November 1891, Arthur’s more explicit story “A Sordid Affair” appeared in the weekly People, which had serialized his sensationalist novel The Firm of Girdlestone the year before. The new brief story featured another fictional incarnation of Charles Doyle. A dressmaker’s husband, “a small man, black bearded and swarthy,” is an amateur artist. Formerly a clerk, his “long course of public drunkenness had ended in a raging attack of delirium tremens, which could not be concealed from his employers, and which brought his instant dismissal from his situation.”
Although exhausted by years of worry and trouble from her husband’s drunkenness, the dressmaker, Mrs. Raby, believes that she can help him conquer his demons. “It was always with others that she laid the blame, never with him, for her eyes were blind to the shattered irritable wreck, and could only see the dark-haired bashful lad who had told her twenty years ago how he loved her.”
Mrs. Raby makes a beautiful gray satin foulard dress on order for a customer—only to find it missing the next morning. Arthur was again drawing upon his own family’s sad experience when he wrote the scene in which Mrs. Raby rushes to a nearby pawnshop to find her newly made work hanging on a hook.
“That’s my dress,” she gasps.
The pawnbroker says, “It was pawned this morning, ma’am, by a small, dark man.”
Later, on the street, Mrs. Raby sees a crowd of boys jeering at “a horrid crawling figure, a hatless head, and a dull, vacant, leering face.”
She hails a cab, and someone helps her pile her husband into it.
His coat was covered with dust, and he mumbled and chuckled like an ape. As the cab drove on, she drew his head down upon her bosom, pushing back his straggling hair, and crooned over him like a mother over a baby.
“Did they make fun of him, then?” she cried. “Did they call him names? He’ll come home with his little wifey, and he’ll never be a naughty boy again.”
Arthur closed the story with an apostrophe to his mother (and possibly to his sisters and Touie): “Oh, blind, angelic, foolish love of woman! Why should men demand a miracle while you remain upon earth?”
* * *
Soon Arthur passed another literary milestone. Longmans, Green & Company published The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales in England in March 1890 and the following month in the United States. Here Arthur’s early attempts at sensational fiction could cavort together for the first time—the title story alongside “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” his fictionalized take on the Mary Celeste ship; his horror story “The Ring of Thoth” partnering with his horrific story “John Barrington Cowles” to produce chills. “The Parson of Jackman’s Gulch,” which D. H. Friston had illustrated two years before his drawings adorned A Study in Scarlet, was thus rescued from the ephemeral moment of magazine publication, as were five other stories.
“Dr. Conan Doyle appears to be equally at home,” wrote The Glasgow Herald in its review, “with the eerie, the sensational, and the humorous. The motifs of all these stories are well selected and capitally worked out.” The reviewer seemed unaware of revealing Arthur’s carefully wrought surprises: “In ‘John Barrington Cowles’ the reader meets with a vampire or some similar gruesome monster disguised as a fascinating young lady. And this happens in Edinburgh!”
Arthur kept new short stories circulating, and many were accepted—most, of course, reflecting little about his father or other personal matters. As he looked around for new approaches, he thought of continuing his Sherlock Holmes cases in short form. He knew that readers were familiar with series of tales about a recurring character, from Dumas’s several novels about d’Artagnan to numerous accounts in the 1860s by Scotland’s first police detective, James McLevy. Arthur also understood that stand-alone tales with a recurring character would dodge the notorious pitfall in serializing longer works: the potential loss of interest from a reader who had missed one or more issues and had thus lost track of the narrative. A single recurring character of proven popularity would not only establish an author’s loyal readership but also bind readers to the periodical in which his adventures appeared. This might be a selling point for a young author, to help him stand out from his many competitors who were equally eager to fill space in periodicals.