(whistle)
(train whistle)
Mister Holmes.
Hello.
Over 260 films to date
1,000 television episodes, and just as many imitations.
Not to mention the video games, comic books.
Adapted more frequently than
Dracula, Frankenstein, Napoleon, or Jesus Christ.
Across the ages and continents,
he is the literary myth par excellence.
My name is Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes.
It is my business to know what other people don't know.
A unique appearance,
a legendary street address.
The name's Sherlock Homes
and the address is 221B Baker Street.
A motto that we all know.
It's elementary.
A brilliant sense of deduction.
I smell the faint sweet odor of blackmail.
Sherlock Holmes, a paper creation
born out of a writer's brilliant imagination.
Arthur Conan Doyle, a character as extraordinary
as his famous detective,
measuring one meter 92 for 100 kilos of muscle,
an accomplished sportsman, cricket champion, prize fighter,
a matchless snooker player, inventor, among other things
of competitive downhill skiing,
the life jacket, and the inflatable raft
an adventurer at heart,
a chivalrous spirit ready for anything, and a genius writer.
Any way you look at it, Conan Doyle was larger than life.
And, if Sherlock Holmes finally erased
his creator from our collective memory,
it was only after a terrible fight to the death.
The war between Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes
lasted for over 40 years.
It began in 1886 in Portsmouth
on the south coast of England.
Arthur Conan Doyle was 27 years old
and had already lived through many adventures.
First as a ship's surgeon on a whaler in the Arctic.
Then along the coasts of Africa.
Barely settled in his cottage in Portsmouth,
he passed the time indulging in his passion, writing.
He was an intellectual man.
There was art in the family and Arthur had inherited it.
His father was a painter.
His uncle, Richard, was a very accomplished
and well known painter and cartoonist.
But Arthur had literary ambitions.
He had always had an urge to be a writer.
The descendant of Irish aristocracy
of French origin from Lisieux.
He was raised by his mother in adoration of the Middle Ages.
Dreaming of writing historical novels.
But, as a newlywed, he needed money.
Why not try his hand at these
crime and mystery short stories
that people liked so much?
Though he couldn't know it at the time,
his first master stroke was to invent
a brand new type of detective.
He trotted noiselessly about the room,
sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling,
and once lying flat upon his face.
In one place, he gathered up, very carefully,
a little pile of gray dust from the floor
and packed it away in an envelope.
Observe carefully, deduce astutely,
and confirm with proof.
Conan Doyle certainly took his models from literature.
Be it Edgar Allen Poe or the French writer Gaboriau.
But he dared to go beyond all conventions
by building intrigues around his character's
extraordinary sense of observation
and use of scientific methods.
What do you think?
There's been murder done.
The murderer was a man.
He was in the prime of life, six feet in height,
has small feet, wears square-toed boots,
limps slightly on the left foot,
and smokes trichinopoly cigars.
The science of deduction,
inspired by Doctor Joseph Bell,
Conan Doyle's professor at medical school
and whose own powers of deduction wowed his students
and was often called upon by Scotland Yard.
He would look at the patient.
He would hardly allow the patient to open his mouth.
But he would make his diagnosis of the disease
and also, very often, of the patient's
nationality and occupation and other points
entirely by his power of observation.
So, naturally, I thought to myself,
"Well, if a scientific man like Bell
is to come into the detective business,
he wouldn't do these things by chance.
He'd get the thing by building it up scientifically."
Furthermore, there's something
in that bag she wants to show me.
What makes you say that?
Bag doesn't match her dress.
Indicating it was picked for size rather than style
to accommodate some bulky object.
You read the stories, you see how clever he is,
you think, "Oh, yes, now he's explained it.
I see how he did it.
I could do that."
You couldn't.
But it's nice to think that you could.
And the second stroke of genius
was his narrator, John Watson.
A military doctor who has returned wounded from Afghanistan.
Sherlock Holmes's roommate, his companion,
and the witness to his adventures.
He's the ideal intermediary between the reader and Holmes.
(phone ringing)
Hello.
Yes, Lestrade?
Oh.
The detective was originally to have been called
Sherrinford Holmes.
His companion, rather hilariously, was Ormond Sacker.
Thank goodness he had second thoughts
about those names, as well.
And they became Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John H. Watson.
He called the story, at first, A Tangled Skein.
It became A Study in Scarlet.
The basis of Sherlock Holmes's success
was in place from the very first volume.
Yet turned down everywhere.
A Study in Scarlet would finally come out
in the modest Beeton's Annual.
And, even then, it was with conditions.
They offered him 25 pounds for the complete copyright.
If he would agree to it being
held over till the following year.
Because, as they said, the market
is flooded at present with cheap fiction.
Not exactly encouraging, is it?
But he accepted the offer and a Study in Scarlet
became the leading story
in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887.
Sherlock Holmes's first investigation
was a commercial failure.
Was Conan Doyle embarrassed?
Relieved instead that the Sherlock Holmes
distraction was over
and he was free to begin working on real literature.
Or so he thought.
An American editor read A Study in Scarlet and liked it.
Passing through London, he invited Conan Doyle to dinner,
along with the famous standee Oscar Wilde.
He commissioned a story from each of them
to help launch his own magazine, Lippincott's, in England.
Oscar Wilde wrote his masterpiece
The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
Conan Doyle hesitated.
Should he stop writing his real novel?
Never.
But he needed money so terribly.
Having settled in London
and with still no patients, and a newborn baby,
100 pounds represented a small fortune.
He reluctantly returned to Sherlock Holmes.
And, after a short month,
delivered the novel The Sign of Four
published in February 1890.
There was no big fuss and it seems like
the end of something that had never really begun.
It was then that an event would
change the course of his life.
The following year, The Strand Magazine appeared.
Within a short while, it was doing as well
as any of the several monthly magazines at the time.
So, he wrote another story
with Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson
as the leading characters.
(violin)
Still in need of money,
Conan Doyle offered a short story.
A Scandal in Bohemia was published in July 1891.
It was an immediate hit.
The Strand clamored for more stories urgently.
150 pounds for six stories to be published each month
like episodes of a serial.
It had not been done before.
A series of connected short stories,
all complete in themselves, but with the same characters.
That was something new.
I take it the new issue of The Strand Magazine is out.
Containing another of your slightly lurid tales.
Indeed.
What do you call this one?
I call it A Scandal in Bohemia.
Not a bad title.
Doyle invented the modern detective story.
All modern detective stories begin with Sherlock Holmes.
Just the very idea of the three act book.
Starting with a murder, the investigation, the solution
self-contained in that way.
Nobody had done it before Doyle.
Sales of The Strand took off
to vertiginous heights.
The public was crazed.
Begging even for past issues.
After a difficult beginning,
Sherlock Holmes had suddenly conquered the readers.
And he seemed to have won the first round
against Conan Doyle's literary ambitions.
He was a man who was believable,
even if he was unusual.
And he lived in the world,
in the city that people knew.
You might go out into Baker Street
and see a tall, thin man.
And you could believe that this
was the real Sherlock Holmes.
A third equally fascinating
tremendous and shadowy character was London itself.
Swallowed in fog with terrible crimes
taking place under cover of night.
The city of Jack the Ripper and of terrifying underworlds.
And one man faced this thriving empire of evil alone.
Engaged in a struggle to the death.
All of the stories are magnetized by
this opposition between the city outside and Holmes,
the asocial genius withdrawn inside his apartment.
Very curious.
What I love about the books is the way
evil spreads its tentacles.
So, in the Sign of Four, it's a temple in Agra in India.
In The Valley of Fear,
it's the Valley of Vermissa in America.
A Study in Scarlet, it's the plains of Uttar.
Places far, far away that nobody in London knows,
yet we've somehow invade London with their evil.
It is not necessarily London.
The books may happen there.
But the evil comes from everywhere.
Holmes himself says, in one of the stories,
the lowest and vilest alleyway in London
does not present a more dreadful record of crime
than the smiling and beautiful countryside.
I am a consulting detective.
The only one in the world.
I invented the job.
What does that mean?
It means, when the police are out of their depth,
which is always, they consult me.
The police don't consult amateurs.
Why was it so successful?
Because Sherlock Holmes gave a face
to something that had not been articulated before.
As if he embodied the spirit of the times.
Foremost, the desire to believe in science's omnipotence
amid an era that had been completely overthrown
by the fascinating and worrying Industrial Revolution.
His astounding deductive virtuosity
bore with it a promise of the eventual triumph of reason.
The end of darkness.
When you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Sherlock Holmes represents hope in the middle of darkness.
I think that what you get with
Conan Doyle's invention of Sherlock Holmes
is the possibility that reason can shine through
and answer all the puzzles of the world.
An unflinching rationalist,
Arthur Conan Doyle brilliantly ushered in
a new discipline, forensics.
Not an accident, my dear fellow.
I'm afraid it's murder.
The first police laboratory
was established in Lyon in 1910
by the Frenchman Edmond Locard,
who has cited Sherlock Holmes's adventures
as his main source of inspiration.
There's been just one step from fiction to reality.
Taking fingerprints, analyzing dust and fabrics,
examining all sorts of traces,
these methods described by Conan Doyle,
applied by Sherlock Holmes, developed by Locard,
formed the foundation of modern investigative work.
But it's not possible to reduce
our fascination with Conan Doyle's characters
simply to his scientific prowess.
Otherwise, why would we be so enraptured with him
more than a century after his birth?
If there's one reason I might put forward,
and it's no more than my own analysis
and a paradoxical explanation,
it's that he created a truly
unsympathetic and very asocial character.
Not the kind of hero that we are used to
finding in the role of the hero.
Mister Holmes?
What?
It's morning.
Allow me to congratulate you
on a brilliant bit of deduction.
From the start,
his character is insufferable.
His knowledge is both vast and very limited.
Nothing else is of any interest to him.
And his character is dark from the very beginning.
Because he's a misunderstood, unstable, unhappy genius.
He's an excessive character.
One who goes too far.
Got anything?
Not much.
She's German.
Rache is German for revenge.
She could be trying to tell us something.
Yes, thank you for your input.
He may be excessively aware
of his own intelligence and talent.
But he also suffers from it.
He suffers from being a bit out of touch
with the world around him.
It's something that pushes him
a bit further into his way of devoting himself.
A bit like someone in the orders.
Though, instead of being devoted to a religion,
it's his detective work which is a sort of calling.
Sherlock Holmes is not a very pleasant man.
He has no interest in music, in art.
Well, he plays his Stradivarius,
but he doesn't listen to music in any way.
He doesn't have any interest in great food or politics.
He has no conversation.
He has terrible moods.
He takes cocaine.
He's a drug addict.
What is it tonight?
Morphine or cocaine?
Well, I can strongly recommend a 7% solution of cocaine.
Would you care to try it?
I don't know how Arthur Conan Doyle did it.
But, when we readapt Sherlock Holmes's codes today,
it always works.
There's a series called Doctor House
clearly inspired from Sherlock Holmes.
The character is unsympathetic.
He's a drug user like him.
And also lives at number 221B.
There's a sort of alchemy to this character that is,
at once, detestable and remarkable.
Oh, thank you.
It was Conan Doyle's genius
to only describe Holmes through Watson's eyes,
the embodiment of the every man.
Watson has a very precious role
in Sherlock Holmes's existence.
He brings Holmes back to reality
and bounds him to Earth.
How can you risk such damage
to the great powers with which you have been endowed?
He's the most normal character
in Sherlock Holmes's universe.
And thus the easiest to identify with.
At the same time, Watson is like us.
He's fascinated by Sherlock Holmes.
That was amazing.
He's also Sherlock's only friend.
If he might be called a friend.
Which wasn't the case at first.
You got all that because you realized
the case would be pink?
Well, it had to be pink, obviously.
Why didn't I think of that?
Because you're an idiot.
He's our link to Holmes.
We see him through Watson's eyes.
And Watson, although he's not blind to Holmes's faults,
Watson likes Holmes.
Because of Watson, we like Holmes, too.
And we like them, above all, together.
The genius of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
was to create not two great characters,
but one, the greatest friendship in literature.
That, I think, is part of the secret
of the success of the books.
There is something crucial
to Sherlock Holmes's success.
Readers grabbed onto him
and shaped him in their own fashion
far differently from the way Conan Doyle had imagined.
I saw him as very tall, over six feet,
but so excessively lean that
he seemed considerably taller.
A thin razor-like face with a great hawks-bill of a nose
and two small eyes set close together on either side of it.
The Strand's illustrator Sidney Paget
played a key role in the affair.
Endowing him with the traits
of his own brother used as a model.
Sherlock Holmes came to life under his pencil.
Paget's picture fixed in the public mind
the image of Sherlock Holmes.
It wasn't just the man himself.
It was his clothing, as well.
And, because Sidney, himself,
wore a deerstalker when he was out,
he gave the deerstalker to Sherlock.
That's one of the things that the public latched onto.
They loved this.
The deerstalker, the coat,
then the pipe and the magnifying glass.
Thus the myth evolved.
Progressively escaping from its author.
Forced, despite himself, to bow to his readers' vision.
When, later on, William Gillette, the actor,
became the first to play
Sherlock Holmes in an authorized play,
he replaced the straight pipe,
which appears in Sidney Paget's illustrations,
with a curved pipe because he could hold it
without obscuring his mouth.
Each effectively brought
their little piece to the whole.
Then something strong started to build up
in the collective unconscious.
If you ask anyone to quote a phrase by Sherlock Holmes,
everyone will answer...
Elementary, my dear Watson.
It features in
none of Arthur Conan Doyle's books.
None.
Yet who would hark today that
"Elementary, my dear Watson," is not his?
It's his.
Well, what were you saying, Gotsome?
Uh...
Well?
Uh...
What?
Uh, the mystery at the museum...
Elementary, my dear Gotsome.
Elementary.
Thanks to the fortunes coming from the Strand,
Conan Doyle could live off his craft from as early as 1892.
But he had other worries.
His paper creation had taken life
and was starting to steal from his work.
Creating a character
is just like raising a child.
We give them the elements that
seem essential for them to grow.
We gave them the values that seem
essential in order for them to
live the life we wish for them.
And then, at a certain moment, they emancipate themselves.
They make their own decisions.
And that's what Sherlock did.
He became stronger.
He became more powerful.
He escaped from his creator.
And that was very hard for Arthur Conan Doyle to take.
Conan Doyle became fed up with Sherlock Holmes,
his greatest creation.
Why?
Because he thought he was a better writer.
He was also fascinated by things like
spiritualism, by politics, by travel, by the world.
And he thought of Sherlock Holmes
as sort of beneath him and entertainment.
He had it in him, he knew, to be a novelist.
One of his greater idols was Sir Walter Scott,
the Scottish novelist who wrote Ivanhoe, Rob Roy.
He was the man, really, who created the historical novel.
And Arthur was a great admirer of
the ideals of Medieval knightly chivalry.
And this is what he wanted to write about.
And he did.
Alongside the Sherlock Holmes stories,
he had written two historical epics.
Micah Clarke had a tepid reception.
But his Medieval adventure, The White King,
had been widely acclaimed.
Conan Doyle believed himself to descend from
the Briton king, Conan I.
Yet it was still Sherlock Holmes
that readers called out for.
It was a difficult blow for the writer.
He had the impression that
Sherlock Holmes's investigations
did not help him, Conan Doyle, to progress as a writer.
And so, as the Strand Magazine clamored for
a new Sherlock Holmes story every month,
Conan Doyle struggled to make sure
their quality did not drop.
He cared that his stories' literary value remained the same.
That's why he finally felt like a prisoner.
And then could no longer even stand Sherlock Holmes at all.
He decided to kill Sherlock Holmes.
And, when he told his mother about this decision,
she was furious.
She wrote to him, "You can't.
You won't.
You musn't."
The Strand Magazine also came charging back.
Ordering another series from him.
Conan Doyle hesitated then demanded more money.
Considerably more money than
they paid him for the first set.
Hoping that they'd say no.
They didn't.
They said, "Yes, please."
(laughter)
Trapped, 1,000 pounds for 12 new adventures.
Three times more than for the first series.
Who could resist?
And so, in 1892, Conan Doyle returned to Sherlock Holmes.
A gilded cage, but a cage nonetheless.
And this damned detective was starting to overshadow him.
People did seem to believe that
Sherlock Holmes was a real person.
Even in those early days,
Arthur Conan Doyle was getting letters
addressed to Sherlock Holmes.
He was not particularly happy about it.
Come in.
Oh, Doctor Watson.
This came by hand for Mister Holmes not 10 minutes ago.
Thank you, Mrs. Hudson.
Dear Sherlock Holmes,
I would be pleased if you could help the German police
to solve a most mysterious robbery.
Dear Mister Holmes,
our office requires your services on account
of one of our clients.
Please kindly notify us of your availability.
I have your friend, Doctor Watson.
If you wish to see him alive again,
immediately send 5,000 pounds to this address.
Not so very long ago, there was a poll taken
by one of the major newspapers among young people
listing various historical people
and asking whether they knew which were real
and which were fictional.
An awful lot of them thought that
Winston Churchill was a fictional character,
but Sherlock Holmes was a real person.
We all know that he doesn't exist.
And we all know that 221B Baker Street doesn't exist.
We all know that it's made up,
but we like to believe it.
This character is so well made psychologically
that he could exist.
Detective story provides a sort of a comfort, I think,
a reassurance that it is possible in one way, at least,
even if it's only a whodunit,
to find the absolute truth.
And, therefore, I think people do become
very invested in this character.
And want to believe in him as more than
just a sort of figment of somebody's imagination.
Like a child writing to Santa Claus,
we need something to believe in.
And there is no harm, I think,
in believing in Sherlock Holmes.
Some characters,
psychically very strong ones,
escape from the creations and arrive in our world.
And, if we admit that things circulate
between the real world and the world of fiction,
then we may also ask ourselves whether
we, ourselves, are not fictional characters.
This uncertainty is what Freud calls the uncanny.
Played on by literature and mythical characters
to the point that we can no longer be sure
if they exist or not.
Fiction was becoming
more powerful than reality.
Invading and transforming it.
Not only was that devilish Sherlock Holmes
ruining his career as a writer,
but there he was attempting to erase him, his creator.
Reducing him to the role of simple secretary.
If Holmes wanted a fight, he was going to get it.
The great Conan Doyle was not one to do things halfway.
This final story would be an apotheosis.
He created a master criminal,
gave him the name of a fellow pupil
at Stonyhurst School, Moriarty,
and made him Holmes's intellectual equal.
A man as brilliant as Sherlock Holmes himself.
Oh, Professor Moriarty.
A titanic confrontation
with a worthy adversary, the nefarious Professor Moriarty,
the Napoleon of crime, the evil genius,
and prince of darkness.
His inversed double.
And their final battle would take place
in a spectacular setting, the Reichenbach Falls,
which he discovered while touring Switzerland.
The Final Problem was published in The Strand
in December of 1893.
The story ended with the inevitable conclusion.
Holmes and Moriarty falling intertwined.
The two sides of the same mystery.
Light and darkness united.
Dying together in the Reichenbach's frothing abyss.
Holmes.
Conan Doyle had sacrificed
the goose that laid the golden eggs and without regret.
And the readers were horrified.
They didn't want to believe it.
It's said that people went about their business
in the city wearing mourning bands on their sleeves.
Letters of protest were written
to the author and to the publisher.
And, in his memoirs, Conan Doyle quotes one
which starts "You brute."
I heard of many who wept.
I fear I was utterly callous, myself.
And only glad to have the chance of opening out
into new fields of imagination.
For the temptation of high prices
made it difficult to get one's thoughts away from Holmes.
Free at last, despite the pleas and menaces,
he held strong.
No more Holmes.
The mere mention made him feel nauseous.
But, most of all, he felt alive once again.
Traveling the world despite
the tuberculosis of his wife, Louisa.
He had Norwegian skis delivered to Davos, Switzerland.
Launching the sport.
In America, his conference tour met with huge crowds.
He spent many months in Egypt
for the sake of Louisa's health.
As soon as he returned, he settled the family
into a huge house in Surrey.
And began work on a new series of historical novels.
In 1897, at 38 years of age,
he fell madly in love with a 24 year old beauty.
The liaison would remain platonic for several years.
Then, when trouble broke out in Sudan in 1898,
heeding the call of adventure,
he left as a war correspondent.
Another war erupted in South Africa
between the British and the Boers.
And, despite his age, he enlisted in 1899
and established a field hospital at his own expense.
He wrote many articles defending the British situation.
And, for this, he was knighted in 1902.
Thenceforth to be known as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Sherlock Holmes defeated?
Not so simple.
The rascal held fast.
Almost 10 years after having disappeared, he returned.
My mind rebels at stagnation.
Give me problems.
Give me work.
Give me the most obtuse cryptogram,
the most intricate analysis
and I am in my proper atmosphere.
The public called out for Holmes.
Conan Doyle needed money and he finally gave in.
But just once.
And it would be a rather odd return.
Under pressure from his readers,
Doyle was forced to bring him back.
And actually used a ploy.
Because he didn't present the investigation
as happening after Holmes's death.
But as an old case.
This old case was
The Hound of the Baskervilles,
which he set three years before Holmes's death.
It was out of the question for him to resuscitate his hero.
Surprise, he was no longer battling
the darknesses of London.
But a fantastical creature.
A big black dog who, under cloak of night,
was spreading fear across the moors.
It's a fairly strange book.
The mood is off.
And then there's the strange absence of Holmes.
Who appears very little since it's Watson
who is central to the discussions and investigations.
Which is a problem since, in this book,
as in the investigations on the whole,
Watson is presented as a complete fool.
He is the perfect example of the person
who sees nothing and stands nothing
and is wrong in his interpretations.
Sherlock Holmes is there,
but in the distance.
Conducting his only investigation and watching Watson.
As if Conan Doyle returning to his hero
had been seized by doubt.
Conan Doyle's ambivalence
towards Sherlock Holmes in this story
is such that one's allowed to wonder
if the whole investigation is not overcome with weariness.
Because, as others have noted,
the case does not really hold together.
What's remarkable is just how many times
Sherlock Holmes makes mistakes.
We go from one implausibility to the next.
From incoherence to incoherence.
We have no figure of absolute truth whatsoever.
On the contrary, there's someone
with gaps in their reasoning.
And these are the gaps that we must fall through
to see The Hound of the Baskervilles
in a completely different light.
Sherlock Holmes caught out?
If we take the clues at face value,
it is clear that the detective has the wrong culprit.
But, furthermore, he seems quite ambiguous this time.
He often appears over the moors
as a dark, maleficent figure
that even Watson doesn't recognize.
It's been a lovely day, Watson.
Far too lovely to spoil.
I hope you'll be careful with that revolver.
And so he's presented doubly.
Duplicitous and ambiguous.
He's the representative for the good and the truth,
but, in the same book, he's also the representative of
far more obscure dark forces and of error.
(howling)
Quickly, Watson.
Conan Doyle very clearly
understood the character's double power.
(howling)
This is why Sherlock Holmes became a myth.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
would go on to be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
most famous story.
Its success remained unequaled.
There was an uproar after its publication
in The Strand in 1901.
And a tremendous amount of pressure to bring back Holmes.
But, this time, there was nothing doing.
It really was over claimed the author.
Even for $5,000 per story plus royalties
offered by the American magazine Collier's,
$30,000 for six stories, $65,000 for 13?
Impossible to refuse.
And so, Sherlock Holmes was resuscitated
on September 23, 1903.
Legends aren't killed so easily.
I think it is interesting
the whole idea of the writer who finds himself
hidden by his own creation.
Who finds himself smaller than his creation.
The same thing, in a way, happened to Ian Fleming
who got rid of James Bond not once, but twice.
From Russia, with Love, he's poisoned
and he's meant to die.
At the end of You Only Live Twice, he's got amnesia.
He's vanished as a Japanese fisherman.
But, all the time, these characters come back.
They won't go away.
Watson, do you mind if I smoke a cigarette
in your consulting room?
But how did Sherlock Holmes survive his fall?
Elementary, my dear Watson.
He never fell.
A Japanese wrestling move had sent Moriarty ad patres.
So, to explain his hero's extended absence,
Conan Doyle invented a myriad of adventures.
During this period known as The Great Hiatus,
Holmes had changed identities.
He'd met the Dalai Lama in Tibet, explored Norway,
crossed Persia, visited Mecca, lived in Khartoum.
Sherlock Holmes won in the end.
Seemingly appeased, Conan Doyle had surrendered.
Throughout the following 33 adventures,
Conan Doyle played with his character,
had fun creating a biography for him.
Perhaps as a way of reaffirming his authority over Holmes.
Born in 1854, Conan Doyle came from the aristocracy
and had an elder brother, Mycroft,
who worked for the government.
Doctor Watson would marry
while the detective remained a hardened bachelor,
faithful to the memory of the mysterious Irene Adler,
the adventuress he'd met back in A Scandal in Bohemia.
If you must record my exploits,
I do wish you'd put less emphasis on the melodramatic
and more on the intellectual issues involved.
It's true that
Arthur Conan Doyle's life changed.
His wife Louisa died in September 1906.
A year later, he then married his great love, Jean Leckie,
with whom the relationship had
previously remained platonic.
He traveled with her and the children from both marriages.
Trying his hands at politics,
fascinated by the march of progress.
All in all, a peaceful coexistence
with his burdensome detective.
And he decided to show that he was at least
on a par in real life.
Wasn't he the creator?
And so, Doyle began playing at detective.
Conan Doyle, himself, was generally more like Watson
than like Holmes.
But, because he was able to create and solve
these fictional crimes and mysteries,
he knew that he could adapt his mind temporarily
to become a detective.
And he was a man with a great sense of justice.
So, when people came to him with problems,
if he thought the problems were serious enough,
he would try to help.
In 1906, he took up the cause
of a young lawyer condemned to seven years imprisonment
for the mutilation of animals.
The evidence proved George Edalji innocent,
but his Indian descent made him the perfect scapegoat.
Conan Doyle succeeded in
methodically demonstrating the miscarriage of justice.
Arthur Conan Doyle put up a really unimpeachable case
for the innocence despite the fact that
the man had been convicted.
The conviction was never overturned,
but George Edalji was given what they call a free pardon.
And he was allowed back as a solicitor.
And he was rightly grateful to Arthur Conan Doyle
for the rest of his life.
In a mischievous twist,
Conan Doyle, defender of lost causes,
had become a real Sherlock Holmes.
But he was already taken with a new idea.
The discovery of a iguanodon prints near his home
had set his mind abuzz.
He was gripped by the idea of
a brand new character and novel.
Professor Challenger, with his face
and beard of an Assyrian bull.
The antithesis of Holmes.
A far off country forgotten by evolution.
A terrifying prehistorical bestiary.
(dinosaurs roaring)
The Lost World appeared in The Strand in 1912.
It was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
And, this time, Conan Doyle's success
was in no way due to Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes, whose adventures he continued
in a somewhat freewheeling fashion,
pushing him off to the countryside
and the joys of beekeeping.
And then bringing him out of retirement occasionally
to solve some new enigma.
The First World War found Sherlock Holmes too old to enroll.
And so, he was sent to serve his country
by uncovering a German spy.
The war would sweep everything aside.
Arthur Conan Doyle sensed that.
Convinced of the key role to be played
by airplanes and artillery,
he tried to convince the chiefs of staff,
pestering them with advice
and lobbying for bulletproof jackets and gas masks.
He enrolled and placed his writing
in the service of the Foreign Office.
Reporting continually from
the English, Italian, and French front lines.
And something broke.
At the end of the war, he seemed like a different man.
Marked by the horrors he'd been through
and the death of his eldest son,
the writer ventured into unexpected territories.
A confirmed atheist and militant rationalist,
Conan Doyle became an ardent defender of spiritualism.
Why should we fear a death
which we know for certain
is the doorway to unutterable happiness?
Why should we fear our dear one's death
if we can be so near to them afterwards?
Even more surprising
was his fascination in 1922
for the case of two schoolgirls in the village of Cottingly
who claimed to have photographed fairies.
Though mocked, he paid no heed and considered
the psychographs to be definite proof
of the existence of spirits.
They were genuine photographs.
But those photographs were not of fairies.
They were of cut out pictures from a magazine
of very 1920s looking little fairies.
Many people are confused as to why Conan Doyle,
who believed in fairies and ghosts and spirits,
was also able to come up with
such a rational creation as Sherlock Holmes.
But I think you have to understand
Conan Doyle as a romantic.
And, as a romantic, his view of science
is that anything is possible.
Also, at the same time,
action at a distance was being observed.
The effects of radiation.
There were experiments with wireless telegraphy.
Scientists therefore thought it was possible
that there could also be unseen forces
which could be scientifically proven
which were also happening
in spiritualism and in spiritualists effects.
For example, Marie Curie attended seances
because she was trying to identify
what form of energy was
causing tables to rise off the ground.
When I talk on this subject,
I'm not talking about what I believe.
I'm not talking about what I think.
I'm talking about what I know.
There's an enormous difference, believe me,
between believing a thing and knowing a thing.
I'm talking about things that I've handled,
I've seen, that I've heard with my own ears.
And always, mind you, in the presence of witnesses.
Goodbye.
Conan Doyle devoted the rest of his life
to traveling across the world defending spiritualism.
The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place,
the last story featuring Sherlock Holmes,
appeared in The Strand in 1927.
It was the end of 40 years of companionship and conflicts.
Exhausted, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died
of a heart attack in 1930.
He was 71 years old.
A literary monument, a prolific inventor
graced with a tremendous appetite for life.
The colossus would, nonetheless,
lose the battle with his paper creation.
Doyle was a mere mortal while Sherlock Holmes,
who'd never lived, would not die.
That is the paradox and ruthlessness
of literature's mythical characters.
They erase the memory of their creator.
Within a few decades, Conan Doyle's other writings
were forgotten and, even more so, the events of his life.
Meanwhile, in an insolent twist,
his detective moved on, traveled the world and times.
Evermore alive, adapted into
no less than 120 novels to date.
What makes Sherlock Holmes timeless
and the reason that we like him even more 100 years later
is that we very quickly realized that
he didn't have to stay in Victorian London.
He could change countries, places, periods.
He was credible.
He's been set against
Jack the Ripper, Dracula, Frankenstein.
Adapted into hundreds of films, parodies.
He has appeared in every media imaginable.
Each time, he's different, yet unchanged.
The center of an ever growing passion.
It's as if he expresses
a timeless aspect of the human spirit,
the eternal opposition and enigmatic complicity
of light and darkness.
But isn't that precisely the power of myths?