Sherlock Holmes In America (43 page)

In Yonkers, New York, Conan Doyle had dinner with John Kendrick Bangs, the writer best known now for using Sherlock Holmes as a character in his comic novel
The Pursuit of the House-Boat
. A biography of Bangs tells how everyone went upstairs to change for dinner, and what happened after Conan Doyle came down and took a seat in Bangs's library: “As Bangs crossed the hall to the wide doorway of the library, he saw the back of Doyle's head above the plush comfort of a chair which had been drawn up before a blazing fire on the library hearth. At the same moment he was shocked to see his son move swiftly upon Doyle from the rear, and, with a Gollywog Doll poised on high, bring it down upon the crown of the distinguished creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle like a flash seized the boy and went to the floor in a wrestling match, easily bringing the attacking party to complete subjection. Looking up and smiling, Doyle eternally subjected Bangs also. ‘Oh, never mind, Mr. Bangs,' he said. ‘This is only another example of the irrepressible conflict between Old England and Young America!'”

Newspaper reporters sometimes asked him about exactly that sensitive issue. Conan Doyle told an audience of American literary men at New York's Lotos Club that Britons “exult in your success and in your prosperity,” but at a dinner in Detroit he took exception to some derogatory remarks about the British Empire made by an intoxicated speaker late in the evening. “You Americans,” he rose and said in reply, “have lived up to now within your own palings, and know nothing of the real world outside. But now your land is filled up, and you will be compelled to mix more with the other nations. When you do so you will find that there is only one which can at all understand your ways and your aspirations, or will have the least sympathy. That is the mother country which you are now so fond of insulting.”

Conan Doyle visited Brattleboro, Vermont, to have Thanksgiving dinner with an expatriate Briton, Rudyard Kipling, and his American wife and in-laws, and they astonished local residents by playing a game of that newfangled sport, golf, across a nearby cow-pasture. In Philadelphia, he had dinner at the home of publisher Craige Lippincott in Rittenhouse Square. In New York City, he met with a less affluent publisher, S. S. McClure, and gave him a check for a thousand pounds sterling by way of investment in his struggling magazine—an amount he afterwards said accounted for the entire net proceeds of his lecture tour, worth about $100,000 in today's money.

And there were a number of literary luncheons at which he met the writers and would-be writers of the day. These tended to be events for gentlemen only, but there was one particularly festive lunch in Chicago, at the home of a distinguished banker, at which ladies were present as well as businessmen, a prominent clergyman, and two noted authors of the time, Eugene Field and Hamlin Garland. Field took the opportunity to tease Conan Doyle a little by asking him to sign a copy of one of his books—a cheap, badly printed, pirated edition of
The Sign of the Four
, at a time when copyright and literary piracy in America were continuing aggravations for British authors. This one took the joke well: next to his signature in the book he drew a skull and crossbones, and wrote a doggerel verse about pirates. He also signed a copy of the printed menu for the event, and all the guests did likewise. That menu is still in existence, owned by a private collector.

Some souvenirs of the trip are preserved in institutions now. The public library in Niagara Falls, New York, has the autographbook maintained by the owner of the inn where Conan Doyle stayed overnight. The illustrated menu for the Lotos Club dinner, whose talk by Conan Doyle that night follows, is framed on the wall of the club's grill-room. Among the most touching documents of all is the diary kept by Lydia Kendall, who saw him lecture at the City Hall in Northampton, Massachusetts, and wrote at length about the experience. “He is a finelooking man of thirty-five,” she wrote, “very tall and well-proportioned.” That firsthand evidence of the tour is now in the archives at Smith College, where Kendall was a student at the time.

Anyone who wishes to stand where Conan Doyle once stood, and imagine how Lydia Kendall saw him 115 years ago, can have that experience in Northampton, for the City Hall on Main Street still stands. So does Plymouth Church on East Hampshire Avenue in Milwaukee; so does the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Lafayette Avenue; so do many other halls in which audiences heard his “Readings and Reminiscences.” Similarly, today's pilgrim can walk in the footsteps of the visiting author to Cooper's Cave in Glens Falls (though it is no longer open to tourists as it was then), and even spend a night in Naulakha, Kipling's house in Vermont where Conan Doyle spent the Thanksgiving holiday in 1894.

The tour ended in early December, as Conan Doyle was eager to get home for Christmas. He and his brother sailed from New York on the Cunard liner
Etruria
, landing in Liverpool on December 15. By this time he was the author of two more books than when he had departed for America.
Round the Red Lamp
was a collection of medical short stories, most of them previously unpublished, which had come out in October, in time for the reviewer in Worcester, the one who didn't like
The Lord of Chateau Noir
, to complain about its sordid and painful content as well. And
The Parasite
, a creepy and sexual story about hypnotism, had appeared at the beginning of December.

That December, the first of the Brigadier Gerard stories,
How the Brigadier Won His Medal
, appeared in
The Strand Magazine
. Conan Doyle had apparently written it shortly before leaving for the United States, and at one of his lectures, making a change from his usual material, he read it aloud from the proof-sheets that he had been correcting. Now, back at his desk, he started turning out more adventures of the Napoleonic swashbuckler, as well as a story of English prizefighting in the same period, the early nineteenth century, that would become the novel
Rodney Stone
. For the toast of literary America, returned to his British roots, there was never any lack of things to be written.

A. Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was the creator of the most successful detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes, whose exploits took on a life of their own to thousands of mystery readers around the world, and still resonate with a large audience today. His creator studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, served as a senior physician at a South African field hospital during the Boer War, and was knighted in 1902. His writing career had been well established by then, with the tales of Holmes and his chronicler and companion John Watson passing from literature into legend.

(Toward the end of his first trip to America, on November 18, 1894, Conan Doyle was given a dinner in his honor at New York's distinguished Lotos Club, attended by many leaders of New York public and literary life. “Dr. Doyle is not more than thirty-five years of age, closely fulfilling his own conditions of the man most to be envied—‘a writer of romances who has not passed his thirty-third year,'” said the club's twenty-fifthanniversary history (
A Brief History of the Lotos Club by John Elderkin, Lotos Club: 1895
). In his remarks, Conan Doyle demonstrated that if some Americans were unfriendly toward the British Empire, as he found on his speaking tour across the country, he was nonetheless a Briton enchanted by America.)

T
here was a time in my life which I divided among my patients and literature. It is hard to say which suffered most. But during that time I longed to travel as only a man to whom travel is impossible does long for it, and, most of all, I longed to travel in the United States. Since this was impossible, I contented myself with reading a good deal about them and building up an ideal United States in my own imagination. This is notoriously a dangerous thing to do. I have come to the United States; I have traveled from five to six thousand miles through them, and I find that my ideal picture is not to be whittled down, but to be enlarged on every side.

I have heard even Americans say that life is too prosaic over here, that romance is wanting. I do not know what they mean. Romance is the very air they breathe. You are hedged in with romance on every side. I can take a morning train in this city of New York; I can pass up the historic and beautiful Hudson; I can dine at Schenectady, where the Huron and the Canadian did such bloody work; and before evening I have found myself in the Adirondack forests, where the bear and the panther are still to be shot, and where within four generations the Indian and frontiersman still fought for the mastery. With a rifle and a canoe you can glide into one of the black eddies which have been left by the stream of civilization.

I feel keenly the romance of Europe. I love the memories of the shattered castle and the crumbling abbey; of the steel-clad knights and the archer; but to me the romance of the redskin and the trapper is more vivid, as being more recent. It is so piquant also to stay in a comfortable inn, where you can have your hair dressed by a barber, at the same place where a century ago you might have been left with no hair to dress.

Then there is the romance of this very city. On the first day of arrival I inquired for the highest building, and I ascended it in an elevator—at least they assured me it was an elevator. I thought at first that I had wandered into the dynamite gun. If a man can look down from that point upon the noble bridge, upon the two rivers crowded with shipping, and upon the magnificent city with its thousand evidences of energy and prosperity, and can afterward find nothing better than a sneer to carry back with him across the ocean, he ought to consult a doctor. His heart must be too hard or his head too soft.

And no less wonderful to me are those Western cities which, without any period of development, seem to spring straight into a full growth of every modern convenience, but where, even among the rush of cable cars and the ringing of telephone bells, one seems still to catch the echoes of the woodsman's axe and of the scout's rifle.

These things are the romance of America, the romance of change, of contrast, of danger met and difficulty overcome, and let me say that we, your kinsmen, upon the other side, exult in your success and in your prosperity, and it is those who know British feeling—true British feeling—best, who will best understand how true are my words. I hope you don't think I say this or that I express my admiration for your country merely because I am addressing an American audience. Those who know me better on the other side will exonerate me from so unworthy a motive.

Martin H. Greenberg is the CEP of Tekno Books and its predecessor companies, now the largest book developer of commercial fiction and nonfiction in the world, with over two thousand published books that have been translated into thirty-three languages. He is the recipient of an unprecedented three Lifetime Achievement awards in the Science Fiction, Mystery, and Supernatural Horror genres—the Milford Award in Science Fiction, the Bram Stoker Award in Horror, and the Ellery Queen Award in Mystery—the only person in publishing history to have received all three awards.

Jon Lellenberg has coedited over half a dozen anthologies of new Sherlock Holmes stories by mystery writers, and with coeditor Daniel Stashower also produced 2007's
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters
, an award-winning collection of the correspondence of the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Mr. Lellenberg is a member of the Mystery Writers of America; the historian of the Baker Street Irregulars, America's foremost Sherlock Holmes club founded in 1934; and the U.S. representative of the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Daniel Stashower has produced a number of Sherlockian anthologies and other projects with coeditor Jon Lellenberg, including the award-winning
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters
. Stashower is also the author of the Conan Doyle biography
Teller of Tales
. He is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, and lives in Washington, D.C.