3 - Decades of Critical Neglect (1931–1970)

Summary

For all practical purposes, after Doyle's death his creative work simply stopped being of interest to academic critics. Admittedly, some of his fiction continued to be read. The Holmes stories remained popular. Additionally, three of his novels—Sir Nigel, The White Company, and The Refugees—and his short-story collection The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard were included on a list of books recommended as collateral reading for American high-school students (Cole 1932, 343). Yet the dearth of critical commentary between 1931 and 1970 lends strong credence to the notion that he was on the way to joining the dozens of other writers popular in their own day but quickly forgotten after their deaths. For years he remained alive in public memory chiefly as the creator of the most famous fictional detective in world literature. Meanwhile, a small coterie of devotees continued to celebrate Doyle's other works, attempting to place his phenomenal success with the Holmes stories in a balanced portrait of his achievements as a writer.

Memorializing Doyle

The first biography of Doyle appeared less than a year after his death. John Lamond, author of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Memoir (1931), was an activist in the Spiritualist movement. Doyle's widow supported Lamond's work, gave him access to Doyle's papers, and wrote an epilogue for the volume. Predictably, Lamond's biography is slanted toward a defense of Doyle's involvement with the Spiritualist movement—a position that, Lamond admits, alienated Doyle from many friends and associates. The Memoir is divided in two nearly equal sections. The first traces Doyle's progress from struggling physician to internationally acclaimed writer, famous for creating Holmes. Lamond is silent on Doyle's struggles with the love triangle he created by falling in love with Jean Leckie (and carrying on an affair that may or may not have been platonic) long before his first wife, Louisa, finally succumbed to the tuberculosis that made her an invalid for more than a decade. Lamond is light on literary criticism but suggests that the historical novels and the histories of the Boer War and First World War were not likely to survive the test of time.

Even in the first section of his Memoir, Lamond takes pains to trace Doyle's progress from Roman Catholicism through phases of agnosticism and materialism to a gradual acceptance and public declaration of his belief in Spiritualism.