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...LIFE OF SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (304 pp.)-John Dickson Carr-Harper...
...Bork was right, of course: only the man from Baker Street could have outsmarted the whole German Intelligence system. And readers of this new biography will feel not only that Arthur Conan Doyle was the one man who could have created Sherlock Holmes, but that Doyle's whole life made the creation inevitable. For, as Biographer Carr clearly shows, Doyle and Holmes were at heart one & the same person...
Love That Scrubwoman! Conan Doyle was born (1859) in Edinburgh, the son of a frustrated painter who scraped a poor living in the civil service. Almost from the time he could toddle, the brawny boy was steeped in the favorite subject of Britain's poorer gentlefolk-the ancient and glorious past of the withered family tree. Impoverished Father Doyle claimed a relationship with the ducal house of Brittany. Little Arthur spent many of his juvenile hours memorizing the family coats-of-arms, while his plucky mama briskly scrubbed the floor and called out knightly maxims: "Fearless to the strong...
Only the Dead Live. Like many another writer, Conan Doyle was convinced that his most popular pieces (the Holmes stories) were mere potboilers. Full of love of the vanished days of chivalry and armored knights, he poured his heart into what he considered his "serious" fiction: The White Company, Sir Nigel, Micah Clarke. But soon he realized that that man Holmes was stalking him as remorselessly as if he were a criminal. He tried to shake Holmes off by demanding "impossible" prices for Holmes stories-only to find that the publisher gladly paid up. Doyle became rich on Holmes...
...when he was knighted, Conan Doyle had grown into a grandiose private and public figure. His household became enormous, as he hurled his money and energy into corps of servants, stained-glass heraldic windows, horses, racing-cars, motorcycles and miniature railroads. His children were so terrified of him that once when his little daughter was prattling innocently about "the fertility of rabbits" she noticed one of her father's blue eyes appear around the corner of his morning Times and fix her with a look so deadly that she nearly fell out of her chair. The War Office regarded...