Although Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is primarily remembered as the person who created Sherlock Holmes, his influence and career was more diverse than merely crafting detective stories. Doyle himself, for instance, was most proud of his historical novels, which included The White Company in 1891. Horror, science fiction and poetry were likewise amongst the numerous genres that Conan Doyle ventured, making him one of the most prolific writers of all time.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s life was equally diverse. Born into a successful artistic family, he grew up in relative poverty. Doyle then attended medical school, but ultimately proved unsuccessful as a general practitioner. Despite his success in the realms of fictional literature, meanwhile, Doyle was knighted in 1902 by King Edward VII because of his non-fiction writings during the Boer War.
And although his greatest creation – Sherlock Holmes – was firmly fixated on matters of the material world, Conan Doyle was himself a spiritualist who not only believed in an afterlife but the existence of ghosts and that human mediums were capable of making contact with the recently departed.
Doyle was raised Catholic but eventually disassociated himself from organized religion at an early age. His search for internal meaning eventually led him to Spiritualism, and Conan Doyle dedicated the later years of his life advocating the existence of a spirit world despite the negative effect his beliefs eventually had on both his reputation and financial resources.
During the 1920s, Arthur Conan Doyle traveled around the world on behalf of Spiritualism, lecturing in various locales across Great Britain, North America, and Australia. The list of cities includes Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Doyle spoke at the Carnegie Music Hall on April 20, 1923 – the one and only time the creator of Sherlock Holmes ever visited the Steel City.
“As you come deeper into the iron country you seem to be descending into one of Dante’s circles, and a glance at sooty, smoking Pittsburgh makes it very clear why Carnegie lived in Scotland,” Doyle wrote in Our Second American Adventure, an account of his 1923 tour. “From the riverside it is a terrible looking place, but one is agreeably surprised when one reaches the hinterland to find what fine buildings there are, technical colleges, libraries, galleries, and all sorts of amenities to mitigate the atrocities of modem industrialism. On the whole, Pittsburgh, bad as it is, compares favorably with our own dreadful northern towns, whose brick lanes I knew so well in the days of my medical novitiate.”
Despite such unflattering remarks, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle apparently took an interest in the history of the Steel City. “‘Where is the fort in Pittsburgh?’ was one of his first questions when he had settled himself in a taxicab en route to the William Penn Hotel,” the Pittsburgh Sun reported at the time. “‘And where is the place where General Braddock fought his memorable battle? Where does the Ohio River form?’ he queried, as he looked down on the Monongahela River from the Smithfield Street Bridge.”
Although Conan Doyle was in Pittsburgh for a lecture, he was able find the answers to his numerous questions during his visit as well. “The most interesting object in Pittsburgh is the old British fort down by the river which was the nucleus of the town,” Doyle wrote in Our Second American Adventure. “It was a frontier defense of the colonies in the old days, and it was in an attempt to relieve it when it was besieged by the French and the Indians that Braddock and his army were ambuscaded and destroyed in the woods a few miles off. I had not time to visit the place, but I inspected the old grey fort, which is quite a small building, a sort of a sunken martello tower, loopholed for musketry without any embrasure for cannon.”
While Arthur Conan Doyle’s opinion of Pittsburgh may have been mixed, the same could be said of Pittsburgh’s opinion of Arthur Conan Doyle. “Sir Arthur, who came to Pittsburgh to lecture at Carnegie Music Hall tomorrow night, is a visitor who is none less likeable, whether or not an individual agrees with his doctrine,” the Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph explained. “With a brusquely big mustache that contrasts to his softly inflected voice, hair that is turning non-grey, and a body that is almost gigantic, Sir Arthur received friend and foe with like courtesy. He has an air of childlike simplicity, of earnest sincerity that shames scoffers. It is the attitude of a man so absorbed in his beliefs that he cannot imagine the possibility of any one being so unkind as to ridicule them.”
The Pittsburgh Sun, meanwhile, offered a slightly different description of Conan Doyle. “There comes, every now and then, a human being whose egoism is so stupendous that it overwhelms,” the newspaper reported. “A being whose belief in himself is so great that the word egoism seems lacking in force when applied to such a being. Such is Sir Arthur. Yesterday, without so much as the usual lead, ‘Of course, I know it will sound awfully egotistical,’ Sir Arthur solemnly declared that he was chosen by Providence to tell the common herd that there is no spiritual death.”
Pittsburgh residents apparently came out in droves during the evening of April 20, 1923, to witness Conan Doyle firsthand at the Carnegie Music Hall. As for the lecture itself, the presentation followed the same format as the many others that Arthur Conan Doyle recited in cities around the world.
“His lectures took two forms, the photographic and the philosophical,” historian Martin Booth explains in The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 2000. “The former consisted of a magic lantern slide show of recorded phenomena including apports and spirit photographs. Once the audience, which in those days generally believed in the veracity of the camera and considered that it could never lie, was curious and interested, the second lecture kicked in. In this, he presented the moral and ethical basis for his new religion.”
Although Doyle may not have attracted any new converts to Spiritualism during his stay in the Steel City, it ultimately made no difference to the crowd that descended upon the Carnegie Music Hall. They were not present to hear “ghost stories,” after all, but to simply see the man who had created Sherlock Holmes.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s relationship with Holmes was always an up-and-down affair – Doyle even killed off the Great Detective at one point, only to resurrect him years later. Ironically, it is Doyle’s “pulp fiction” detective stories that have grown in popularity over the decades as opposed to his more accomplished historical novels, and his belief in Spiritualism is now nothing more than a footnote in the life of the esteemed author as well.
If it wasn’t for Spiritualism, however, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would never have visited Pittsburgh. Doyle may not have been the personification of Sherlock Holmes but the famous fictional character is indelible linked to him nonetheless, and Doyle’s brief time in the Steel City is the closest the region ever came to hosting the Great Detective – a singular feat in and of itself.
Anthony Letizia