Review: 
Arthur Conan Doyle – Beyond Sherlock Holmes, Andrew Norman’s biography of Arthur Conan Doyle is one of those books that got off to a rocky start with me and I should have DNF’d after the Preface.
However, I wanted to know how preposterous the book could actually get, or, ever so hopeful, if the premise set forth in the Preface was just an unlucky and sensationalist choice of “bait” that would be abandoned in the course of Norman’s investigation of ACD’s life.
As I don’t want to string anyone along, the book did not improve after page 11, which is where the Preface ended. In fact, if anything it got worse. So, if you plan to read on this short collection of thoughts about Norman’s biography of ACD, you’re in for a bit of a rant.
To recap, the Preface of the book seems to say that Norman’s focus in this biography will be to explore what motivated a reasonable, logical fellow to believe in such ridiculous concepts as spiritualism and fairies, and the last paragraph of the Preface suggested that Norman’s conclusion was that Doyle must have suffered from a mental illness:
Not only that, but this illness was itself a hereditable disease, in other words, one which Charles may have handed down to his son via the genes. Suddenly I realised that I now had an opportunity to solve what I consider to be the ultimate mystery, that of the bizarre and extraordinary nature of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself.”
This was the in Preface! I don’t know about other readers, but unless I am reading an academic text where the expectation is that the conclusion is summarised in the prefacing abstract, I am not looking to have the author’s assumptions stated as facts on page 11 (!) of what I would hope to be a gripping biography of an extraordinary personality.
Strike 1!
Next we get two (yes, TWO!) short chapters on Doyle’s childhood, which are mostly pre-occupied with his the difficulties that his family had to cope with – mostly his father’s alcoholism. There is, in fact, little about young Arthur in these chapters.
Following this we get no less than ten (TEN!) chapters about Sherlock Holmes. Not just about the writing and publication of the Sherlock Holmes stories but actual interpretation of Sherlock as a character – all substantiated with apparently randomly selected quotes from the different stories.
Seriously? A book that carries the subtitle of “Beyond Sherlock Holmes” should not focus on the one topic that the subtitle seems to exclude. What is more, there are only 25 chapters in this book in total. Norman has spent 10 of them on Holmes. That is preposterous.
Strike 2!
Luckily, we get back to ACD after this with a brief run down of his involvement in actual criminal cases, where he managed to prove vital in overturning two miscarriages of justice, and his work and life during and after the First World War.
Unfortunately, there is nothing new or detailed in this, and the focus and ACD is superficial. Norman uses these chapters to write about ACD’s father’s illness and time in various mental institutions, surmising at what kind of psychiatric condition he suffered from. This, however, can only be guesswork on Norman’s part. Charles Conan Doyle was hospitalised privately. There are few actual medical records. What is more,even if there had been medical records, the areas of psychiatry and medical treatment of addiction or mental illness in the 1890s was still in its infancy. The recording and diagnosis of cases of people who had been hospitalised or committed can hardly be described as reliable. And yet, Norman, with the help of The Shorter Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry (by Michael Gelder, Paul Harrison, and Philip Cohen) dares to presume to make a diagnosis of what illness may have plagued Charles Conan Doyle, and has the audacity to infer that Arthur Conan Doyle may have inherited the same potential for mental illness because in one of his works he wrote that he knew, rather than believed, that fairies existed!
What utter, utter rubbish!
And, btw, I kid you not, but the The Shorter Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry is referenced throughout the relevant chapters as the ONLY source to back-up Norman’s ideas.
WTF?
Never mind that spiritualism was an actual thing in the early 1900s and that ACD was not alone in believing in fairies and magic and the paranormal. Instead of investigating ACD’s interest, Norman’s work in this book is not just superficial but outright lazy. He simply regurgitates the same outrage and disbelief over how a man of sound mind can belive in something fantastic. With this book, Norman simply jumps on the gravy train of sensationalism and continues an outcry over the notion that an author of fiction may have believed in something other than hard facts.
I can’t even…
Fuck this book. (Note: This is Strike 3!)
Seriously, I have no idea what Norman’s other books are like, but he seems to have written several other biographies featuring Charles Darwin, Agatha Christie, Robert Mugabe (seriously???), and others.
None of which will ever end up on my reading list.
Original post:
BrokenTune.booklikes.com/post/1651038/arthur-conan-doyle-beyond-sherlock-holmes
Broken Tune's Blog 
Well, you called it – it’s a train wreck. Sad to see you wasted so much time and energy, but the rant was certainly a worthy read. lol
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You know, one of the reasons I did want to write a full review was because this book has so few reviews anywhere else – and the reviews and ratings I found before picking it at the library gave the book 3 or more stars and made me think it would be a reasonable read. It would have helped me immensely if someone else had mentioned some of the books “angles”.
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Sounds to me like your review will be a public service then… which really, every review should be, but some people just don’t have critical thinking skills. Unpacking a book like this requires such skills. I’d like to think writing a book like this would require those skills, but apparently not.
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I have feeling that the author needed to pay bills. This is “hack work”, and I’m not using “hack” in a flattering way here.
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The word hack should never be used flatteringly. But even so… unless you’re a bestselling author, the idea of writing a book to pay bills is just preposterous. It’s a field that doesn’t pay well at all unless you somehow make it big. It’s even more difficult when writing non-fiction… if you can call this book by that label. But maybe none of that on the list of critical thinking either. Somebody thought it was good enough to publish. That’s sad to me.
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I have a lot of time for hacks. 🙂 Well, the original hacks, anyway. Btw, they were the first authors to refer to themselves as “professional”. I like how this got turned against them later…
I don’t think this was his first biography. The author turned to writing after an injury put a stop to his medical career. He’s published several biographies, and all on subjects who have some popular appeal. So, once there was a book deal in place, quality may have been a less of a consideration than the ability to sell – which a controversial premise about a popular public figure is known to do. Call me cynical.
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That’s because before they were professional writers, they were playwrights and poets. lol. My, how we’ve lost the romanticism…
Cynical, but still critical enough to call it like it is. This just sounds worse the more you describe the situation.
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The one thing I take away from this book is that I now know what I am looking for in an ACD biography – and it is a focus on ACD, not Holmes. I can read and re-read Holmes and his character and background should and does (!) speak from the stories. I should not need to refer to a biography of the author to understand his work.
Sure, there are questions that come up that I want to know the author’s stance on but this is not a precondition to understanding the stories. They’re separate. So, for me writing about an author as if s/he can be analysed through their work is nonsensical.
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Agreed. Understanding the author should reveal deeper understanding of the works, but it should not be necessary to understand the work in the first place. The caveat to that, however, is that it does become more important to understand author, time, and place the older works get. Most medieval works, for example, can’t be understood without that anymore. Holmes… we’re not to that point yet. It’s still very much a style readily understood by contemporary readers. That’s part of why he’s so popular. And honestly, Holmes and ACD are opposing personalities on a number of fronts. That makes learning about the author fun.
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Oh, agreed! It definitely helps to know something about the author and times, but it also depends on the work itself.
For some of the oldest works, we may not be exactly sure who the author is. Some may have been attributed to an author, but there may be some uncertainty. I’m thinking Ancient Greece here. And for some authors, our knowledge of biographical events may be based more on legend than fact. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we cannot understand the work. What I mean here is not the actual deciphering of the language and how words and expressions have changed, but that reading something , decoding and attributing meaning is also such an individual experience that knowing about the times and author is not always relevant. Of course, these provide more insight. Of course, without them it is unlikely that the reader understands what the author intended.
However, we can usually derive something from the work itself without having that additional context – even if it is just a sense of wonder of how someone came up with cuneiform, how information from tablets was disseminated, whether Wather v.d. Vogelweide had many opportunities to sit on stones, etc.
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While I do agree with you to a large extent, I think it’s safer to say that without that author intent being known in many such cases, the work itself has no choice but to stand on “universal” ideas of whatever contemporary analysis says it is. Maybe that changes over time, maybe it doesn’t. There are too many question marks when we get into territory like that. At the same time, if a work speaks to us, does it ultimately matter what the author’s intent is? I always come back to other types of art on this. Tchaikovsky’s work is autobiographical, and knowing him absolutely makes the pieces even better, whereas Wagner was a Semitic asshat, but even Stephen Fry can look past that to defend the majesty of the music in play. Applying such matters to literature… it may be just something we each have to decide for ourselves. The importance of any work’s author is immaterial if we don’t like the work in the first place, and the reverse seems to hold just as true in most cases. Either way, it sounds like the author of this biography is just pulling things out of his butt in an attempt to sound like he knows what’s talking about. Like you say, sensationalism. It’s not the same as journalism, but it certainly gets confused a lot.
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Oh, but I agree on both points: that without the knowledge, the interpretation is that of the person or group (“universal”), which is ultimately at least somewhat informed by contemporary ideas, and that it ultimately doesn’t matter what the author’s intent is. That the work is a separate entity.
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I think in the end, there’s no way around that. The art has to stand on its own, or the artist failed. It’s harsh, but there it is.
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Exactly!
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