That got me to wondering, if Doyle did believe so strongly in faeries and the supernatural, why didn’t it appear as a given in his Sherlock Holmes stories? Why no lines such as, “You see, Watson, the fact that Mr. Hennimore was strangled in a locked room with no other way in is a clear sign that out killer must have the ability to materialize through a solid wall!”
Doyle was so into the supernatural he was convinced Houdini did his tricks by paranormal means. So why did that all give way to evidence and logic when it came time for his fiction?
Not a definitive answer, but my own hypothesis, based on what I know of the man…
The stuff Doyle believed in - primarily fairies and spiritualism - would have been either outside the scope of what Holmes dealt with, or short circuit the story, by letting the victim explain what happened instead of letting Holmes solve it.
Didn’t Doyle really only get into the supernatural relatively late in his lifetime, long after he had created Sherlock Holmes and established the “rules” for the stories about him?
The whole premise behind the Sherlock Holmes stories was that Holmes was a man of logic and science. Conan Doyle was smart enough not to let his personal beliefs wreck the universe that Holmes occupied.
“Doyle struggled to find a publisher for his work. His first work featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, A Study in Scarlet, was written in 3 weeks when he was 27 and taken by Ward Lock & Co on 20 November 1886, giving Doyle £25 (£2700 today) for all rights to the story. The piece appeared one year later in the Beeton’s Christmas Annual and received good reviews in The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald.[8]”
and
“Also in Southsea in 1887, influenced by a member of the Portsmouth Literary and Philosophical Society, Major-General Alfred Wilks Drayson, he began a series of psychic investigations. These included attending around 20 seances, experiments in telepathy and sittings with mediums. Writing to Spiritualist journal Light, that year, he declared himself to be a Spiritualist and spoke of one particular psychic event that had convinced him”
{Bolding mine}
So it seems that the writing and the interest in the supernatural both started at about the same time.
But he truly believed that supernatural stuff existed, not just ‘yeah, I think this is true.’ So why not let it be part of Holmes’ world? He believed that Houdini did his escapes by materializing out of his bonds, despite Houdini’s insistence it was all trickery. With that mindset it seems odd that Holmes is so opposite how Doyle thinks the world works.
If literally anything is possible, how could anything be deduced? What could be ever be eliminated leaving that which–however improbable–must be the truth.
That’s the answer, right there. He had to keep it somewhat based in reality, so that readers following along with the mystery might be able to solve it with Holmes. He was a mystery writer, not a science fiction writer.
At about the same time, William Hope Hodgson wrote a series of stories about a detective named Carnacki, who investigated ghosts and other psychic phenomena. The stories are a bit odd to read, because you’re not sure whether they’re going to end with logical explanations or pure handwavium. Carnacki uses an Electric Pentacle in some of his investigations, which I’ve always thought would make a good subject for a diorama.
Yes, I thought of Carnacki in connection with this thread. Those stories are set in a world in which ghosts and such really do exist, but some hauntings are faked, so you don’t know ahead of time whether the phenomena Carnacki is investigating are going to turn out to have natural or supernatural explanations.
For that matter, Holmes didn’t entirely reject the possibility of the supernatural. He view was just that, if it did exist, it wasn’t his concern. For a real barghest, if such exists, you’d want a priest. Since he’s not a priest, he couldn’t do anything about a real barghest, so if he’s to do anything, it can only be by proceeding on the assumption that it’s a hoax.
One thing to note is that many people who believe in spiritualism et al. think it is all very scientific and logical. From that point of view there would be no reason to exclude it from a Holmes story.