What made you want to investigate Arthur Conan Doyle?
I’ve had a huge, weird crush on Sherlock Holmes since I was about 9 or 10. My favourite story is The Hound of the Baskervilles, which I have read more times than I can count. Although I love Sherlock Holmes, I have always felt less warmly about his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, who seems to me like a man who was a bit pleased with himself. But one thing that did intrigue me is the way that he seemed to be ashamed of his hugely popular character. I thought we could find a way of making him sympathetic, and interesting – and perhaps even vulnerable – by probing into his life and his papers and looking at his feelings of inadequacy in relation to Sherlock and conceiving a series that was about a battle between the two of them for life, and death.
What is it that has made the character of Holmes so long lasting in its appeal?
Mr Holmes is a character that you can transport to various times and cultures: he’s so distinctive and he makes sense in different times and places. And you can see that in the endless stream of film and television adaptations of his story. He’s female, he’s Asian: he can work in so many different contexts.
And Conan Doyle’s writing is very modern as well.
Yes, his writing is extremely fast paced and when the original stories were published, they were intensely modern. If we watch screen or TV adaptations now, there is a tendency to think there is something “heritage” about them, but Conan Doyle was very up to date with medical technology, with forensic methods with guns and weapons, lots of different skills, so for the first readers, Sherlock Holmes was very innovative. I think an equivalent today would be a mix of CSI for all the forensic and scientific detail and Line of Duty in terms of how audiences are teased with clues, some of them red herrings.
Also, because he was writing in a short story form, it really works – the dialogue is very clever, his description of the world around him is so strong and atmospheric but very, very light. No words are wasted. It’s addictive.
Considering how popular the Sherlock Holmes stories went on to become, was it surprising to discover that Conan Doyle had many rejections before finding a home with the Strand Magazine?
Yes, it is really surprising. Sherlock Holmes was a slow burn and rejected three times before Arthur found a publisher and that is because he was looking in the wrong place. He pitched Sherlock Holmes to very upmarket publishers, like today’s New Yorker. Sherlock Holmes was just too mainstream for that. The rejections scarred Arthur and made him slightly ashamed of his character, because he wanted to be a high-brow writer. Nevertheless, he persevered because he was short of money, and he had a family to support, and he was also very, very hardworking, and energetic.
After Sherlock’s first two outings, both of which were lacklustre in terms of readership, his literary agent suggested a new magazine called the Strand, which was a mid-market magazine aimed at commuters, who were hustling and making a life for themselves in the busy throbbing urban world of London in the 1890s. There, Arthur struck gold.
What was the most surprising thing you learned?
With the success of Sherlock, Arthur appeared to have everything he ever wanted, including appearing in the Strand Magazine as one of the celebrities of the age. On the surface, his life was golden, but he was not happy because it was not the success he dreamed of. He wanted to be taken seriously as an upmarket, respectable establishment figure.
This desire comes from his backstory, I think. He had a difficult childhood. His father’s alcoholism, and the time he spent in an asylum, meant he could not work, Arthur’s mother worried constantly about the family finances. Arthur himself was a man with secrets, he began a relationship with a much younger woman, an opera singer, who he eventually married. So, Arthur Conan Doyle, like so many Victorians, is not quite the man he presents on the surface.
But I also grew to have great sympathy for Arthur, particularly when he lost his son just before the end of World War I. He became interested in seances and mediums in an attempt to make contact once again, it’s heartbreaking. Once you see him as a grieving father, it changes your perception of him and made me see him as a human being, someone you cannot totally worship or totally dislike because he is human like all of us.
Conan Doyle took inspiration from his early medical training and experience, which informed his writing.
Yes. One of the ways in which Arthur made Sherlock really exciting and thrillingly current was by incorporating scientific and medical advances. Sherlock was inspired by a teacher Arthur had at medical school in Edinburgh, Dr Joseph Bell, who was skilled in looking very closely at the patient to discover tiny clues that would help inform his diagnosis. Arthur wanted to create a detective who would treat crime in the way that Dr Bell had treated disease.
What did you find the most interesting part of Conan Doyle’s personality and how that informed his writing?
Because Arthur was at medical school, and later became a member of the establishment, including being knighted, you would think, oh, he must have been a really rational person. But in the 1920s after the death of his son we see his growing interest in mysticism.
I think it must have always been there, and it came to the fore in the 1920s, he became a spokesperson for spiritualism in a way that made him into something of a figure of fun. It is fascinating that Arthur thought that the paranormal was a new frontier of science, which would in time be proved to exist. If you think about what a medium does, they put you in touch with your loved ones, making you feel better, a way of dealing with grief, if you like, and this is exactly what Sherlock did. He made things better for people, like the role of a priest or a mystic. If Arthur had not always had that sort of interest in what lies beneath our rational selves, perhaps he would not have been capable of creating Sherlock Holmes.
You filmed at locations across the UK and also made a visit to the famous Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. What was that experience like?
It was such an intense pleasure because in the first place, it is stunningly beautiful, and second, because it has such meaning in the Sherlock Holmes story as the setting for Holmes’ “apparent” death. It is a powerful story because of Dr Watson’s intense grief. You really believe that Watson has lost a person who was hugely important to him. He is really, really devastated by this, as readers were. They really mourned Sherlock Holmes.
For Sherlock Holmes fans, it is a place of pilgrimage, as is Dartmoor, where The Hound of the Baskervilles was set. Conan Doyle was fantastic at drawing on landscape and real places to give his stories colour. Intense, vivid colour.
The first of three episodes of Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley on The Case of Conan Doyle screens on Sky Arts, from Thursday, November 21.
