This could have been a wonderful book. Take a scene from it which could so easily have been the start of a film. It is the 1920s, and in the garage of a large stockbroker’s mansion in the Home Counties two youths, the spoilt and jobless sons of a rich man, are noisily tuning a hell bat ( actually a modified Model T-Ford ), a car already capable of 100 m.p.h. Dissolve to the woods above them, to silence broken by tinkling notes.
Among the trees their elderly father is playing a musical box. A huge and powerful individual, with the sort of moustache then popular among army officers of field rank, he has, according to his earlier biographer Hesketh Pearson, ‘no more mystery about him than a pumpkin’. The only thing is, the pumpkin is playing the musical box with one hand to attract beings whom, a camera in his other hand, he expects to photograph. This is Conan Doyle. The creator of Sherlock Holmes, who believed in the solution of crime by scientific method, has himself come to believe in fairies.
And this is how that long, industrious life of the public man, the champion of lost causes, the cricketer who once got W. G. Grace out, the best-selling author known the world over, came to an end, in honours, gullibility, riches and farce. This could have been such a vivid book, but unfortunately that scene in the Surrey green belt occupies just two sentences in a single paragraph, and is lost among the 527 pages of this biography.
All the uncles are listed, the grandparents, the sisters and the education (we are up to page 50 before the man even leaves college), and all that is missing is what Conan Doyle himself found in Boswell, and which, ironically, his own biographer quotes.
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