Ice, Whales and Ghosts

 Two fun facts about Arthur Conan Doyle:

1. In 1880, not long after finishing his medical training, Conan Doyle served as surgeon on the whaling vessel Hope. Young and eager for adventure, he also directly participated in whale and seal hunts.

2. Conan Doyle was a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe and considered Poe to be a major influence on his later writing. Whenever Conan Doyle dipped his pen into gothic horror, you can see this. This is a good thing--by the time Conan Doyle found his own voice as a writer, he could be influenced without being imitative and thus turn out some awesome stories.

You can definitely see Poe's shadow in the short story "The Captain of the Pole-Star," first published in the January 1883 issue of Temple Bay magazine. It was afterwards anthologized a zillian times, most commonly in Conan Doyle's oft-reprinted short story collection The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Stories.

It's an early story and perhaps not quite as polished as his later stuff, but it's still a lot of fun to read. It obviously draws on Conan Doyle's own experience on a whaler, but effectively tosses in a ghost while effectively building a sense of tension and horror.

The narrator is the ship's doctor. We join the action with the ship trapped in ice and the crew soon going on half-rations. That's bad enough, but there is also the problem of a captain who might be insane and crewmen who keep claiming to see a strange figure wandering the ice near the ship. A few of the crew also claim to have heard unearthly screams.

The doctor is a rational man, so discounts this as superstition acting on the nerves of the crew. But the captain spends a lot of time starring out over the ice and seems to be waiting for someone. 

But then the doctor personally hears the screams: 

I was leaning against the bulwarks when there arose from the ice almost directly underneath me a cry, sharp and shrill, upon the silent air of the night, beginning, as it seemed to me, at a note such as prima donna never reached, and mounting from that ever higher and higher until it culminated in a long wail of agony, which might have been the last cry of a lost soul.

The next day, the captain... well, read the story yourself HERE. Take a young new writer with burgeoning talent, add in some E.A. Poe and the memory of a whaling voyage and you get a delightfully creepy short story out of the mix.

Blowhard or Hero? Or Both?

 

Between 1894 and 1903, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 17 short stories about a Napoleanic soldier with a tendency to brag about his accomplishments. The stories have an older Gerard, long after Waterloo, describing his adventures as a young officer and mentioning multiple times per story how he always conducted himself with courage and cunning. He's a great storyteller, though, so the tales he tells are enthralling.

I see two possible ways to interpret the Gerard stories. Either he was an unexceptional soldier (or perhaps not a soldier at all) who tells tall tales about a fictional version of himself. OR he was an exceptional and brave warrior who had the chops to back up his ego. In this latter case, the stories he tells are true.

I enjoy taking the second option. Gerard's stories are a lot more fun if (in the context of Doyle's fictional world) really happened. He can be a bit of a blowhard, but earned his bragging rights several times over.

"How the Brigadier Came to the Castle of Gloom" was published in the July 1895 issue of The Strand. Gerard tells a story from 1807, when he was a captain serving in Poland. While on a mission to bring fresh horses back to his unit, he meets the young Sub-Lieutenant Duroc, who is looking for the man who murdered his father during the bloody days of the revolution.

Gerard and Durac end up at the castle of Baron Straubenthal, the man who commited the murder. Durac challenges the Baron to a duel, but the villain is without honor and tricks them into walking into a supply cellar. The two soldiers are locked inside while the Baron sends a messenger to a nearby unit of Cossack raiders. 

So an escape needs to happen quickly. I don't want to give away too much, because there's a link below to find the Gerard stories and read them for yourself. But it involves an unhappy stepdaughter smuggling them a key, a gunpowder bomb, a fight with a dog, and a sword duel. 

It's great stuff. Whether Gerard is telling a "true" story or if he's inventing/exaggerating his exploits, he (or rather Conan Doyle) is one of the best storytellers ever. 

The stories were eventually collected into two volumes. You can find the first one HERE and the second HERE.

"Be brave and pure, fearless to the strong and humble to the weak."

It's well-known that Arthur Conan Doyle didn't want to write as many Sherlock Holmes stories as he did--he tired of the Great Detective and, besides, all the furor over Holmes was taking attention away from his historical novels. It was these that Doyle was most proud of.

And with good reason. The White Company (1891), for instance, is absolutely epic.

It's set during the years 1366/67, right smack in the middle of the Hundred Years War--in which England and France are fighting over control of France. The novel's protagonist, though, isn't a soldier. At least not at first.

Alleyne Edricson was the younger son of a nobleman who had been raised in a monastery. As the novel opens, we learn that he would just as soon stay there--content with a quiet life of religious observance. But part of the deal his now-dead father had made was that he would go out into the world for a year before making a final decision.

This leads Alleyne into adventure, war, danger, and the constant threat of death. He turns out to be pretty good at that sort of thing.

Doyle builds both his characterizations and his plot logically and effectively. Soon, various circumstances result in Alleyne serving as a squire to Sir Nigel Loring, a knight who is traveling to France to take command of three hundred archers known as the White Company. By now, we've also met an expert bowman named Samkin Aylward and a big guy known as Hordle John--two men who become Alleyne's best friends and

companions in adventure.

Doyle makes all of these characters seem real, giving them vivid personalities and believable motivations. Sir Nigel is especially notable--a small man getting on in years and with weak eyesight, he's still the best swordsman in Europe and he represents the best aspects of chivalry--always eager to gain honor in combat, but conscious of his duty to his king, his country and those who serve under him. A less talented author would have turned Sir Nigel into a wooden stereotype. Doyle presents him to us as a living, breathing person who just happens to be an epic hero. My favorite knight would still have to be Sir Roger de Tourneville, but Sir Nigel gives him a run for his money. It's a pretty close call.

Nigel's also got a beautiful, tempestuous and intelligent daughter. Alleyne falls in love with her, which means he'll have to prove himself to be worthy of knighthood before he can ask her hand in marriage. He'll get plenty of opportunities.

About two-thirds of the novel consists of Sir Nigel and his companions traveling to France to meet up with the White Company, but they have plenty of adventures along the way, including a fight against a pair of pirate ships while crossing the Channel and the desperate defense of a castle keep against a blood-mad band of peasants.

But as wonderfully exciting as all that is, nothing that comes before matches the battle scene that comes at the novel's climax. The White Company, greatly outnumbered, defends a hill against an overwhelming force of French and Spanish troops. It is one of the most intense and thrilling battle sequences I've ever read.

There's a lot of other aspects to the novel that make it so good. Colorful supporting characters; moments of true humor; small vignettes that give us a panorama of 14th Century life on many levels; prose that uses archaic grammar and is peppered with obscure words, but still flows along smoothly and is often a joy to read.

So I don't blame Doyle at all for saying that The White Company was worth 100 Holmes stories. I don't agree--I'm not sure Doyle ever fully appreciated just how awesome Sherlock Holmes is. But his historical novels should also be remembered fondly. They are the stuff that legends are made of.

You can access the novel online HERE.

The Annotated Sherlock Holmes

A couple of years ago, a wonderful 3-volume The Annotated Sherlock Holmes was published. This included all the original Holmes stuff, with detailed and entertaining annotations, plus a number of cool essays. Many illustrations, including those by Sidney Paget (who pretty much defined our visual image of Holmes), are also included.

Unfortunately, the set was simply too expensive for me--until I noticed them on sale via Amazon for less than 8 dollars each!!!! I could not pass that up and now I'm the proud owner of all three volumes.

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This was a few months ago. One of the features of the set is a chronology that sets out the stories in the order they most likely occur, so I have been gradually re-reading the entire Canon in this order. Last night, I read "The Cardboard Box." According to the chronology, that takes me up though 1892. I've still got quite a few years to go before the Master finally retires for good.

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I haven't re-visited some of these stories in years, so reading them again is great fun. Holmes is perhaps the most perfectly realized fictional character ever created--Orson Welles once described him as "a man who never lived and who will never die." The original stories never get old. And the annotations and essays in this particular set only add to the enjoyment of reading them once more.