Conan Doyle’s Wide World
Tauris Parke €28 Andrew Lycett
Arthur Conan Doyle will for ever be associated with the fog of Baker Street, but while Sherlock Holmes brought the author global fame, he was about so much more than the great detective: physician, campaigner, spiritualist and prolific contributor to a variety of publications.
He was also an intrepid and prodigious traveller who wrote extensively of his adventures and incorporated many of these experiences into his fiction.
This is an anthology of his travel writing, selected by his biographer, and organised geographically. Starting with his early accounts for the British Journal Of Photography of his visits to the Arctic in the company of whalers and sealers, the book then accompanies him across the globe, at the zenith of the British Empire, by train, ship, camel and carriage, from continent to continent, through swamps and jungles, up the Nile, down a diamond mine, in a train crossing the vast prairie lands of North America. For Holmes diehards there are visits to the Reichenbach Falls and the Baskerville moors.
As this volume amply demonstrates, Conan Doyle was a shrewd observer of people, able to evoke a real sense of place. His observations are generally trenchant and perceptive and there is a lot of humour. He was also a man of his time and, though in many ways enlightened, some of his conservative, patrician views reflect the prevailing attitudes.
Although most of the extracts are wonderfully entertaining and wellselected, Andrew Lycett, a respected authority on Conan Doyle, appears to be operating on auto-pilot, providing the minimum in terms of linking commentary.
This is definitely one for the fans: a romantic paean to a lost age.