Didn’t see this thread until just now. Just about all I would have wanted to say has been brought up, but I’d just like to re-iterate that Doyle was as disciplined about his art as most great artists are. He had conceived Holmes as a rational, logical thinker who lived in a rational, materialistic world, and that’s the way he kept him, by gum!*
Of course, other people since have written pastiches involving Sherlock Holmes and Dracula (at least three times), which had to involve him recanting his original stated opinion on vampires. Or taking up with Lovecraftian things, or magic, or the like (as in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series). Doyle would never have written any of these things. They’d have violated his conception of his character and his world. As I pointed out in the other thread, and others pointed out above, Doyle DID write science fiction (and not just his Professor Challenger stories). He wrote horror and fantasy, too, just as Fredric Brown dabbled in all such genres. But, just as Brown would never sully one of his mysteries with a supernatural explanation, or have Ed and Am Hunter go off chasing vampires, Doyle didn’t mix his genres.
Doyle DID have some of the Holmes stories using what would eventually be proven as pseudoscience, as when he leans heavily on graphology, or dealing with gland extracts in “The Adventure of the Creeping Man”. But in those cases he thought he was being scientific – he didn’t know these things would be proven wrong in later years.
(As I pointed out in the other thread, he felt the same way about Professor Challenger. When he wanted to drag in his spiritualist and religious beliefs to what would have been a Professor Challenger story, he invented a new professor, Maracot, for The Maracot Deep. Arguably a good thing, too. The Maracot Deep is an embarrassingly bad book.)
Well, lots of people who don’t believe in the paranormal and supernatural in real life nonetheless write fiction about these topics, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that it occasionally happens the other way around
One of my favorite examples of this is in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” when Holmes deduces a snake (the still-yet-to-be-discovered “swamp adder”) is involved by seeing a saucer of milk and a report that a whistle is heard after a woman dies.
When Holmes solves the mystery, he explains the saucer of milk was used to feed the snake, and the whistle was used by the culprit to call the snake back from the victim’s room.
The story is great, but the scientific inaccuracies bug the crap out of me.
This is a very good point. I was thinking along similar lines and had half-heartedly started keyword searching (<logical>; <sherlock> etc) The Vital Message (The Vital Message by Arthur Conan Doyle | Project Gutenberg) to see if I could shed any light on whether this was how Conan Doyle viewed spiritualism. I think it probably is the case, but keyword searching wasn’t working and it looks like a tough old read; and to be honest I also got distracted by The Coming of the Fairies, which looks like more fun and, I suspect, would also show that Conan Doyle saw himself investigating Fairy Photographs and Fairy Folk in a coolly logical manner.
Which would be interesting to know. The research material is out there, we just need a volunteer.
