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Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

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Years ago I read the biographies of Conan Doyle by John Dickson Carr and Charles Higham, and even tried to get beyond Sherlock Holmes by reading as much as I could of Conan Doyle's other fiction. Therefore I thought I knew something about Conan Doyle as a writer and as a person, but Stashower's fine book was still a revelation to me; it's not an exaggeration to say that I found new insights into Sir Arthur on nearly every page.

Stashower has done his research, but he is also unafraid to use Conan Doyle's semiautobiographical fiction, not to mention his poetry, to provide windows into the inner Sir Arthur that Sir Arthur's own autobiography carefully conceals.

Sir Arthur, of course, created a character that (along with Tarzan) is one of the immortal icons of adventure fiction, a character as popular today as he was when his short stories first hit the STRAND Magazine like a thunderbolt. One thing everyone knows about Conan Doyle is how deeply he resented the fame of Sherlock Holmes, but even here Stashower has some startling information to relate.

He is particularly good on the last couple of decades of Sir Arthur's life, when his seemingly mindless advocacy of even the most infantile and transparently fradulent aspects of Spiritualism, and his output of nearly a dozen unreadable religious tracts, left almost all of his readers convinced he had lost his mind. His endorsement of the authenticity of some photographs of fairies supposedly taken by two little girls (who had actually cut the tiny figures out of very familiar magazine ads for Fairy Soap!), and his calling in a psychic detective to "solve" the not-very-mysterious disappearance of novelist Agatha Christie, were the final straws for even his most tolerant fans.

On top of it all Sir Arthur was a terrible judge of the relative merits of his own fiction, and anyone who attempts to read his entire fictional output, as I did some years ago and as Stashower obviously has, will see how sadly he frittered away and squandered his unique gifts as a "teller of tales."

How could a man who created one of the immortal icons of rationality be in person so gullible, irrational, foolish and unworldly? Well, Stashower does as good a job of explaining the apparent paradox as anyone will probably be able to do. Highly recommended.

This is a very readable and engaging biography of Arthur Conan Doyle. While many people only think of him in association with the stories of Sherlock Holmes, in fact Conan Doyle (his compound last name) was a multi-faceted man who grew up in poverty, became a medical doctor, served on a whaling ship in the Arctic, and worked in an Army hospital during the Boer War. He began his literary career writing stories for magazines, and one of these stories concerned a detective named Sherlock Holmes. The Sherlock Holmes stories became popular, although Conan Doyle did not consider them serious literature and would come to consider the demand for this character as pulling him away from his efforts at more important works.

Conan Doyle lost many close relatives during WWI. Perhaps as a result of this he developed a deep interest in spiritualism, and this interest gradually began to absorb his life as he left off literary pursuits to advocate for spiritualist research via press and podium. This advocacy led many to lose their esteem for the creator of Sherlock Holmes since they assumed that Conan Doyle and Sherlock must be one and the same in personality and temperament.

I was interested to learn that Conan Doyle wrote his detective stories by determining the ending, and then working back toward it. Thus his character's "brilliant observations" and deductions were always carefully planned by knowledge of the solution before it was apparent to the reader. While Sherlock's powers of observation and deduction came to represent a paradigm of rational scientific proof, in reality they were an illusion working back from given solutions. In the same way, Conan Doyle would advocate for spiritualism by pleading for people to restrain their skepticism, and believe in order to know. Seen in this way, the contrast between his flinty-eyed detective and the real-life Conan Doyle's interest in spiritualism seems less dramatic.

Overall, this book read like a novel and was a good balance between Conan Doyle's whole life story and the part of it that involved Sherlock Holmes.

Teller of tales is a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, writer of the Sherlock Holmes series. I was required to read a non-fiction book and write a review for the book on amazon.com. At the time, I had just been introduced to the Sherlock Holmes series, and was currently reading my way though a collection of these novels. I was intrigued by he author's unusual writing style, and somewhat ashamed that I knew nothing about him, so I decided to read his biography.

The author of this biography, Daniel Stashower, addresses a lot of controversies pertaining to Conan Doyle throughout the book, rationalizing some of Conan's more unusual decisions and actions while keeping an impartial 3rd person tone throughout the entire book. "Many critics assume that the reason for Conan's actions were this, but at the time Conan was going through this. It can be speculated that..."

The book was very entertaining and thought provoking. Conan Doyle himself is an interesting character, though he is nothing like his famous book character. Besides eth actual storyline, there were many great books written during Conan Doyle's time period, but none of these books are required reading through high school. After reading this, there are many novels I want to look into, novels that I would never have heard of otherwise. Although I feel it is a shame that many kids my age never have and never will read these stories, I can't remember enjoying any book I was forced to read.

Daniel Stashower has written several mystery novels of his own along with writing this biography. He is also a freelance journalist, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times and many others. However, it is easy to tell that he is a credible author when reading Teller of Tales.

I can only think of one drawback to this book, and it wouldn't be fair to hold this against the book or the writer. I personally can't read more than one book at a time. Since I stopped reading my Sherlock Holmes collection to read this novel, and since the book makes many references to these stories and stories by other authors that I would like to read, the task of finishing this book has become somewhat painful.

Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle was a complex and honorable man. Toward the end of his life he embraced spiritualisim as he did everything else, wholeheartedly, and this led to many people dismissing him as a crackpot. However, as author Daniel Stashower pointst out, such was not the case. Conan-Doyle really believed in life after death. This belief filled the void in his life that was left when he renounced his belief in the Catholic Church. Daniel Stashower has written an even-handed fair biography of Conan-Doyle. The book is well researched and Conan-Doyle comes to life on these pages. Conan-Doyle, of course, is best known for creating Sherlock Holmes but as Stashower shows Conan-Doyle wrote many more works of fiction and non-fiction in his long career. If you want to have an idea of what made the man behind Sherlock Holmes tick then I recommend this book highly.

Daniel Stashower's biography of Conan Doyle is well written, as one would expect from the author of the Houdini mysteries, but never profound. We are given the great man's public life without any deep examination of the inner man. The result is a rather straightforward narrative, interesting because Conan Doyle led a fascinating life, but with all the weight of a magazine profile. The complete absence of citations reinforces this impression, and there are no footnotes, although a comprehensive bibliography is included.

Poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! Acclaimed for his creation of the supremely rational, preternaturally observant detective Sherlock Holmes, he spent many years in later life mocked for his belief in spiritualism, which he considered the "successor to traditional religious thought." Brave, headstrong, and reckless, Doyle was one of England's most vociferous believers in spirits, mediums, ectoplasm, messages from beyond the grave--and even fairies. He was a tireless lecturer on several continents, writing a raft of books on the subject and donating the royalties to various spiritualist organizations. His zeal may have been admired in some quarters, but it was almost universally derided, and in the last ten years of his life, it lost him most of his friends. What happened?

Daniel Stashower's well-written and highly entertaining light portrait of Doyle's career gives some simple but compelling answers. Though Scottish, Doyle was raised a Catholic, but abandoned his faith for agnosticism very early on. Yet he apparently was a born believer, just waiting for a cause. His inventive and appealing Sherlock Holmes stories never struck him as particularly worthy or important and he longed to give the world something of value (he also tried his hand at plays and historical novels). And like many other British citizens during World War I, Doyle suffered heavy family losses and ached for connection with his personal dead.

As Stashower relates with a brisk pace and gentle humor, warm-hearted Doyle's life reads as a succession of fiery causes. A formidable propagandist, Doyle would use his gifts as a writer and lecturer as well as his ever-growing celebrity to raise money and the public's consciousness time and time again. He fought human rights abuses in the Belgian Congo, supported the Boer War, argued for heightened British military preparedness before World War I, supported reforms in British divorce law, and injected himself into famous criminal trials he thought had been unjust. But spiritualism was his ultimate "holy crusade." Stashower minces no words in describing how Doyle was willing to accept or explain away even the most obvious frauds. He was noble and pathetic at the same time and Stashower makes us understand and sympathize with him, though we never see very far into Doyle's personality or his relationships. This is very much a biography of the public man, but given the subject's profound investment in publicizing what he held dear, that focus is appropriate and deeply satisfying.

How could Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the great reasoning detective Sherlock Holmes, have allowed himself to become the dupe of mystics, mediums and mesmerists? Daniel Stashower has tackled a topic ignored or passed off by previous biographers, and he has so in masterful fashion. By examining all of Conan Doyle's life, and pulling together much of the recent scholarship which has been scattered among journals and comparatively outre books, Stashower has brought us our most comprehensive view of the multi-faceted created of Holmes, Prof. Challenger, Sir Nigel and much more. But most of all, he has done a exemplary job of putting Conan Doyle's spiritualistic evanglicalism into perspective. This is an entertaining and thought-provoking life story‹Arthur Conan Doyle would have loved it!

Reading Stashower's monumental achievement on the life and times of A. Conan Doyle I was reminded of the great fiction writer himself. Not only is Stashower admiring of his subject, he is the first biographer of this subject to dazzle the reader with wit, genuine respect and research filled with clarity and integrity. Each chapter reads like a small novelette and not only does this book excite one to examine Doyle's works, but to see how his life made for the stuff of great fiction writing.

I say Arthur Conan Doyle and you say Sherlock Holmes. But don't stop there. Doyle lived a very long, complicated and multi-layered life. This biography won the 1999 Edgar (Allan Poe) Award for Best Biographical Work and it generously explores the origins of Doyle's detective fiction, his science fiction, his fantasy fiction, his historical adventure fiction and his military histories. Sired by an alcoholic father, Doyle was born in 1859 to a Scots family with a very strong, enduring mother. He started as a very young whaling ship's doctor looking for adventure and soon afterward became a struggling provincial doctor who with few patients and time on his hands. He then decided to write his way out of poverty.

The extended Doyle clan were prosperous Irish-Catholic families, who had a prominent position in the art world. Charles Doyle, Arthur's father, a chronic alcoholic, was the only member of his family, who apart from fathering a brilliant son, never accomplished anything of note and was institutionalized for the greater part of Arthur's life. At the age of twenty-two, Charles had married Mary Foley, a vivacious and very well educated young woman of seventeen.

Mary Doyle had a passion for books and was a master storyteller. Her son Arthur wrote of his mother's gift of "sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper" when she reached the culminating point of a story. There was little money in the family and even less harmony on account of his father's excesses and erratic behavior. Arthur's touching description of his mother's beneficial influence is also poignantly described in his biography, "In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life."

It is safe to say that Arthur Conan Doyle turned his life's adventure into literature. As a whaling crew's physician and adventurer, he walked on ice floes, killed seals, and nearly drowned. As a merchantman's crew physician he explored the coast of Africa and battled typhoid among the crew and within himself. As a war correspondent, as a medical volunteer in during the Boer War, as WWI front line army administration observer, he always wrote for himself, his familiar and then later turned the adventure into fiction or military history.

Made famous by Sherlock Holmes, Doyle created other popular characters such as Professor Challenger and Brigadier Gerard. Challenger visited The Lost World
and Brigadier Girard a variety of Victorian Era conflicts. Doyle wrote and invested his theatre plays, sometimes writing well and making returns on his money, other times not. Critics give Doyle recognition for his combat scenes in The White Company and in his administrative reports from the European and Italian Fronts of WWI. In three instances, Doyle challenged judicial convictions of those whom he felt to be innocent or unrepresented before the bar. Establishing a reputation that would be today called an Innocense Mission, he investigated and paid from his own pocket judicial appeals in capital and non-capital crimes.

Throughout his life, he felt infuriated, challenged, and intrigued by the spiritual realm. Having been sternly educated in a Jesuit school, exposed to other cultures view of death in his travels, and finding evidence of an afterlife in his own life's experiences, Doyle practiced Spiritualism. Mediums using automatic writing and channeling spirits were apart of the last three decades of Doyle's life. In part, having lost sons and nephews in WWI, his investigation of Spiritualism gave him some comfort. Spiritualism came to the fore during the 1830s and continued to be matter of scientific investigation by early psychologists through until 1930s in both Europe and America.

Hale and hardy throughout his life, Doyle eagerly embraced sports but not hunting. An avid but unskilled driver of the new automobile, he wrecked a vehicle near his house and was pinned under the car in such a fashion that his back carried the weight of the vehicle. After several minutes his nearby friends lifted the auto off of him and he slowly walked away from the accident. With his reputation for great strength, none of his friends were surprised that his back could carry the weight of vehicle for several minutes and not collapse his chest.

Stashower's biography is well worth reading for its glimpse into the Victorian Era and its description of a writer's life well lived.

This book is great. Stashower does an excellent job of telling the life of Arthur Conan Doyle. Even if you don't like biographies, this book is fun to read.