The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(71)

Murray gasped. “Well, I never . . .”

“Clearly no introductions are necessary,” Wells said with a grin, “Even so, allow me to stick to the usual protocol. Montgomery, this is Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of your beloved detective, Sherlock Holmes. Arthur, these are my friends, Montgomery Gilmore and his charming fiancée Emma Harlow.”

With the vigor characteristic of all his gestures, Doyle bowed politely and kissed Emma’s hand, then extended his arm in greeting to Murray, who first stared at him, dumbfounded. After all, it wasn’t every day one ran into Britain’s best-known author, and creator of one of the icons of literature, in your best friend’s living room. In the days when Murray’s ambition was to become a writer, he had greedily devoured all the Sherlock Holmes adventures, a captive to his charm, but he had also studied Doyle’s life for clues as to his success, in a bid to understand how a young medical practitioner struggling to make a living in Portsmouth could have produced the mythical detective out of nowhere.

That had been in 1886, when the twenty-seven-year-old Doyle had already spent three years in a medical practice, had killed time between visits from his meager list of patients by writing stories and novels. He had published a few short pieces in local periodicals, but his first attempt at a novel had aroused no interest among publishers. Very well, he told himself, he would return to the drawing board. But what if, instead of writing ambitious novels no one seemed interested in, he tried to come up with something original and surprising? What would he like to discover in a bookshop? What would arouse his own interest? Recalling his early life, as though consulting the child he once was in order to discover the true preferences of the adult he had become, he dredged up a name: Auguste Dupin, Edgar Allan Poe’s masterful detective. No detail was too trivial for Dupin, and the fictional sleuth was on the right track, for it was enough to read the newspapers in the real world to understand that the smallest detail contained in a piece of evidence might send a defendant to the gallows or save his life. Poe had only written three Auguste Dupin stories, but the character of the detective had continued to make discreet appearances in the novels of successive authors. For several decades Dupin seemed to have been trying tentatively to come back into the world. What if he, Doyle, gave birth to him by making him the protagonist of a novel? He only had to invent a detective whom readers would find sufficiently fascinating.

He remembered Joseph Bell, a surgeon and lecturer at the University of Edinburgh medical school for whom Doyle had worked as a clerk while he was studying there. It was his job to shepherd patients into the remarkable doctor’s lecture theater, where something would take place that was more like a conjuring trick than anything Doyle had seen before: Bell would receive them, with his aquiline nose and penetrating grey eyes, seated amid his cohort of assistants, and sometimes, before proceeding to examine them using traditional methods, would play at guessing a patient’s profession and character through silent, intense scrutiny. Thus he would pronounce, for example, that a fellow had served in the army, had recently been discharged, and even had been stationed in Barbados. And despite Bell’s explaining to his rapt audience that he had deduced all this because the man hadn’t removed his hat, suggesting that he hadn’t yet adapted to the customs of civil society, and that he suffered from elephantiasis, a disease prevalent in the Antilles, for the first few minutes the effect was tremendous. Doyle told himself that if he could invent a forensic sleuth who applied Bell’s methods to solve crimes using his own skills and not because of a villain’s mistakes or follies, he could reduce the muddled problem of criminal investigation to something approaching an exact science.

Doyle thought his detective could be an amateur sleuth who collaborated with Scotland Yard, even though he despised their methods, the same way Dupin was scornful of those of the S?reté. He picked up his notebook and jotted down a few possible names: Sheridan Hope, Sherringford Holmes, Sherlock Holmes. The last name, which belonged to his uncle Henry’s motherin-law’s father, who was head curator at the National Gallery in Dublin, had the best ring to it. Sherlock Holmes, Doyle whispered to himself in his deserted consulting room, unaware that for the first time he was uttering that nonexistent name that would soon be on everybody’s lips and would be talked about even after he was dead. Doyle was pleased he had resolved the matter of his character’s name so swiftly, but then it occurred to him that readers might find his Sherlock objectionable if he tried to enthrall them by gloating over his own exploits. He therefore needed someone to boast for him, perhaps a fellow sleuth, a man who lived in a state of perpetual wonderment at the detective’s deductive skills, who lavished praise on him, placed him on a pedestal, so that readers, infected by his admiration, would do so as well. And Holmes’s sidekick, to whom Doyle would give the bland name Watson, must be a man of action who could join in Holmes’s exploits but who was sufficiently literary to recount them afterward: perhaps an ex–army doctor, a straightforward man of integrity.

Doyle proceeded to write his first Sherlock Holmes adventure, The Scarlet Skein, and eagerly sent it to a few publishers. But, rejected by all of them, the manuscript kept coming back like a boomerang. Disillusioned, Doyle sent it to a publishing house specializing in popular fiction, and they offered him twenty-five guineas for it. The first Sherlock Holmes novel, renamed A Study in Scarlet, appeared a year later, but contrary to Doyle’s expectations it did not make any splash in the literary pond. Nor did his next, THE SIGN OF FOUR.