When Arthur met Anna: Arthur Conan Doyle and Anna Katharine Green

This essay was first published in Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations

Essay Excerpt

"During the autumn of 1894, Arthur Conan Doyle toured the United States, delivering almost forty public lectures. The extraordinary success of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in America, as in Britain, ensured that the tour was a sell-out. The year before visiting America, however, Doyle had attempted to kill off his great detective after two novels and more than twenty short stories. At the end of 1893’s ‘The Final Problem,’ Holmes confronts his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty and plunges, seemingly to his death, into the Reichenbach Falls.

Concerned by the amount of his time and others’ attention that Holmes was consuming, Doyle wanted to concentrate on what he called his ‘more serious’ literary work—publishing historical novels such as The Refugees (also 1893). There would be a decade with no new Holmes adventures before Doyle would write The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), capitulating to sustained public demand, as well as the lucrative offers of his publishers, to resurrect his most famous character—or, as he tellingly put it, his ‘most notorious’ character.

Doyle might have gleaned some inkling of the difficulty he would have in leaving Holmes behind him during that autumn of 1894. The promoter of the Stateside tour, J. B. Pond, offered potential bookers the choice of three possible lectures. The first, called ‘Facts About Fiction,’ was to include Doyle’s views on Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling as well as a section on ‘The Neurotic Woman.’ Four venues selected this lecture. The second offering, entitled ‘The Novels of George Meredith,’ attracted not one single taker. The third, ‘Readings and Reminiscences,’ promised an account of ‘The Detective in Fiction,’ a discussion of Sherlock Holmes and readings from the Holmes stories. Doyle was asked to give this lecture thirty-four times. American journalists, meanwhile, were besotted by Holmes and insisted on asking Doyle questions about the detective even as he tried to talk about his other books. It was, as Christopher Redmond suggests in his meticulous and entertaining description of the tour, Sherlock Holmes and not Arthur Conan Doyle in whom fans and interviewers alike were most interested."

Recommended Reading

"The Leavenworth Case" by Anna Katharine Green - The seminal work by Green that predates and possibly influenced Doyle's creation of Sherlock Holmes.

"A Study in Scarlet" by Arthur Conan Doyle - The first novel introducing Sherlock Holmes, providing insight into Doyle's early detective fiction.

"The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Arthur Conan Doyle - One of Doyle's most famous Sherlock Holmes novels, written after the character's temporary retirement.

"Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation" by Andrew Lycett - A biography of Wilkie Collins, whose works influenced the detective fiction genre.

"Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film" by Philippa Gates - A scholarly analysis of gender roles within the detective fiction genre, providing context for Green's contributions.