My Virtual Reading Room

Reading this (thanks again to

"Arthur Conan Doyle: A life in letters"; edited by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, & Charles Foley

A delightful book, I would recommend it to anybody who likes Doyle's SH stories. The letters are interspersed with other materials, from Doyle's writings, other people's accounts, etc. A few excerpts:

Doyle about his mother, from his novel "The Stark Munro Letters":

"...She reads when she knits, she reads when she scrubs, she even reads when she feeds her babies. We have a little joke against her, that at an interesting passage she deposited a spoonful of rusk and milk into my little sister's ear-hole, the child having turned her head at the critical instant...."

Doyle in an 1894 interview:

"We talk so much about art that we tend to forget what this art was ever invented for. It was to amuse mankind--to help the sick and the dull and the weary. If Scott and Dickens have done this for millions, they have done well by their art."

And here's the beginning of chapter 1:

"Arthur Conan Doyle's literary turn of mind showed itself early. In 1864, not yet five years old, he took up a pencil to craft a thirty-six-word story involving a Bengal tiger and a hunter armed with 'knife, gun and pistle.' Recalling the story later, he said he had 'remarked to my mother with precocious wisdom that it was easy to get people into scrapes, but not so easy to get them out again.'"