
Teller of Tales
The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle
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Narrated by:
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Richard Matthews
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By:
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Daniel Stashower
Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Teller of Tales sets aside many myths and misconceptions to present a vivid portrait of the man behind the legend of Baker Street, with a particular emphasis on the Psychic Crusade that dominated his final years, the work that Conan Doyle himself felt to be "the most important thing in the world".
©1999 Daniel Stashower (P)2001 Books on Tape, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
"[An] excellent biography of the man who created Sherlock Holmes - and who would like to have been remembered for a great deal more. "(The New York Times Book)
"A gripping sympathetic bio that proves that Doyle was anything but elementary." (Entertainment Weekly)
"An appealing and much-needed biography of the man who created one of literature's renowned eccentrics." (The Wall Street Journal)
His involvement in real-life detective work is well known, although the disappointing outcome of some of his investigations was a surprise to me. More than once he turned up irrefutable evidence of the innocence of the accused, only to find the bureaucracy of British justice unwilling to accept the idea that a conviction was unsound. One of the cases he championed ended with a conviction being overturned on a technicality, but no pardon; the man in question had meanwhile spent 18 years in prison.
He wrote and campaigned vigorously against the horrors of the Belgian Congo — a cause that also drew the support of Mark Twain — only to come under attack himself for the frankness of his descriptions of torture and maiming.
He championed the cause of Roger Casement, the Irish patriot, whose letters from Peru gave him vital background details for the setting of The Lost World. When Casement was sentenced to be hanged for treason — he had (in the middle of the Great War) conspired with the German government to procure arms for an Irish rebellion — Conan Doyle circulated a petition for clemency, insisting that Casement was insane. He refused to withdraw it when the Crown revealed the existence of Casement’s diaries, filled with accounts of his double life as a gay man. Not exactly a stirring endorsement of gay rights; but in his continuing support of Casement despite this “scandal,” Conan Doyle was a lone warrior. Sadly, he failed, and Casement was hanged.
The major dilemma in a biography of Conan Doyle is laying down the Holmes stories side by side with his devotion to seances and other forms of crackpot spiritualism. How could both come from the same person? Yet Stashower succeeds in a remarkable balancing act. He shows an attitude of hard-headed skepticism when it comes to spiritualist doctrine; but he also shows a deep sympathy for the “need to believe” that led Conan Doyle down this primrose path to public ridicule. His devotion cost Conan Doyle both financially and in personal terms. He tried to involve himself in the disappearance of Agatha Christie, consulting a medium for clues. His last novel about Professor Challenger was a preachy tale that ended with Challenger becoming a convert to spiritualism. He became increasingly concerned as spiritualists the world over began raising alarms in the late 1920s about a global ecological catastrophe that would end civilization.
There were costs and embarrassments on a more modest scale. He enjoyed a friendship with the American escape artist Harry Houdini, but their relationship foundered on the rocks of spiritualism. Even after Houdini exposed the trickery behind many spiritualist demonstrations, Conan Doyle remained a staunch believer; he came to suspect Houdini himself possessed psychic powers, including the ability to convert himself into ectoplasm and back again. Houdini, he said, refused to acknowledge this as a matter of professional pride. Their friendship ended in public recriminations.
Stashower’s book is a good literary biography, with generally positive but well-grounded assessments of Conan Doyle’s work in fiction and history. There was, sadly, a falling off of his literary abilities as he aged and as he devoted himself more and more to proselytizing for spiritualism. He was an indefatigable lecturer and, like Charles Dickens, pushed himself beyond endurance on the platform. He died of a heart attack in 1930, sitting quietly in a chair at home. His last words were to his wife: “You are wonderful.”
So is the book, and so is the audiobook.
Wonderful
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Enjoyable, personal human history on Conan Doyle
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Richard Matthews as usual does a stellar job. It is, however, a little un-nerving to hear Felix Leiter (the American CIA agent in Casino Royal) as the voice of the American newspapers. Perhaps he borrowed the voice from Simon Vance or Robert Whitfield.
Sympathetic biography
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A lively, enjoyable look at Conan Doyle
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