…to the other

Here’s the paradox. By any standards, Arthur Conan Doyle was an extraordinary man; a doctor, a politician, a keen sportsman (he once took the wicket of W.G. Grace and he was skiing almost before the word was invented), a social campaigner, a spiritualist and of course a very great writer, not just of detective stories but history, horror and even poetry. And yet the slate of his life was wiped almost entirely clean by his single, greatest creation, Sherlock Holmes. Doyle himself was aware of it. ‘I am in the middle of the last Holmes story,’ he wrote to his mother in 1892. ‘After which the gentleman vanishes, never, never to reappear. I am weary of his name.’

It didn’t work, of course. Even the Reichenbach Falls couldn’t quite finish him off and 120 years later Holmes is still bigger than the man who created him. Who now reads Professor Challenger or Brigadier Gerard? Who could even name one of the 30-odd works of fiction that Doyle published outside Sherlock Holmes? It is an interesting literary curse to disappear into the shadow of your own creation.