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The First World War tore apart
Conan Doyle's familiar world. Like so many others, he lost close
family members to the conflict. Conan Doyle's brother-in-law and
nephew died in combat, while the influenza pandemic took his brother
Innes and his eldest son Kingsley, weakened by war wounds. During
the war, he managed to have himself appointed as an observer for
the Foreign Office, but he was kept away from the horrors of the
western front for fear that he might reveal to the public things
that the military would rather have kept quiet. Even Sherlock Holmes
served England in the war. In the story that Conan Doyle intended
to be the last Holmes outing, His Last Bow, published in
1916, Holmes outwits a German spy.
Conan Doyle found a refuge from the horrors of the war, and he clung
to it tenaciously. Starting in 1916, he publicly declared himself
a spiritualist, and over the next few years he made spiritualism
the center of his life, writing on the subject and traveling all
over the world to advocate his beliefs. Never afraid to take an
unpopular stand, Conan Doyle wrote a book in 1922 called The
Coming of the Fairies, in which he defended the veracity of
two young girls who claimed to have photographed each other playing
with actual fairies and goblins.
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Frances Griffiths
and "friends" |
Towards the end of their lives, long after Conan
Doyle's death, the aged "girls" admitted to having used paper cutouts
as stand-ins for the fairies. Interestingly, Conan Doyle's own Uncle
Richard had invented, in his book illustrations, the typical representation
of a fairy as a little girl with dragonfly wings and a gossamer
gown. No matter how many times Conan Doyle was tricked by mediums
later proven to be dishonest, he continued to believe in spiritualism.
The famous American magician Harry Houdini made a project of trying
to convince Conan Doyle of his error, but all he managed to do was
ruin their friendship. Houdini saw spiritualism as cruel because
it gave people false hope; Conan Doyle, who was already suffering
from serious heart disease, wanted to believe that death was a grand
new adventure. He fought his infirmity, trying to continue writing
and traveling as before. He died at the age of 71, secure in his
spiritualist beliefs.
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Conan Doyle in
the last year of his life |
Doctor, writer, believer in the supernatural—Conan
Doyle's personality encompassed all these traits that contributed
to the Sherlock Holmes stories we love to read today. Conan Doyle's
fanciful imagination, combined with his scientific training, created
ideas that have helped to shape the modern mystery and science fiction
genres. One of the first to anticipate the dangers of submarines in
warfare, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes story on the subject. His novel
The Lost World is the ancestor of Jurassic Park
and countless other films. Another of his stories, "The Ring of Thoth,"
was probably the plot source of the 1932 film The Mummy with
Boris Karloff. An 1883 medical article called "Life and Death in the
Blood," outlining the imaginary voyage of a microscopic observer through
the human body, anticipated the main idea behind the film Fantastic
Voyage. Conan Doyle's most long-lived idea, however, was Sherlock
Holmes himself, who has continued to evolve in our time through the
works of other writers and filmmakers, taking forms even his creator
could never have imagined.
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