Eventually, he abandoned medicine for writing as a career. He had produced scores of short stories in a number of magazines by then, some intended for boys and some for adults. By the time he sailed for America in 1894 he had published seventeen books of fiction, in fact, including three historical novels of which he was particularly proud. Most important, of course, he had invented his Great Detective, and had presented him to an increasingly enthusiastic public in two novels and twenty-four short stories. That little industry he had just brought to an end, however, against the advice of the author’s friends and family. The detective was not only wearing out his welcome with his creator, but taking time and attention away from what Conan Doyle considered his more important work, particularly his historical fiction. In December 1893 he published the short story called The Final Problem, in which he invented an arch-enemy for Holmes, one Professor Moriarty, and disposed of them both at an encounter in the Swiss Alps.
With Holmes making no more demands on him, ACD moved on to other projects. He and his ailing wife spent the fall of 1893 to the summer of 1894 in Switzerland, at Davos, which was not yet a ski resort, but was considered to have a splendid climate for lung patients. He spent time with her and their new acquaintances there, enjoyed winter sports and had skis shipped to him from Norway, and worked diligently at his desk. This period accounts for his semi-autobiographical novel The Stark Munro Letters, and it was also at this time that he created one of the three great characters of his literary career, Brigadier Gerard, a picaresque cavalry officer in Napoleon’s service.
In every sense, he was in the middle of his work and the middle of his life. That was the position when an invitation came from Major James Burton Pond in New York, who was in the business of bringing celebrity speakers to platforms across the United States. An earlier generation had welcomed educational lecturers, but by the 1890s the biggest audiences turned out for speakers who could be entertaining as well as improving, and Pond was the top of his profession, acting as manager to the likes of Henry Ward Beecher and Mark Twain. (He surely did not imagine that a device that had been demonstrated earlier in 1894 by Thomas Edison, a gadget that could throw an image of a moving photograph onto a wall, would soon almost entirely replace lecturing as a form of entertainment.)
Major Pond thought there would be a receptive public for Arthur Conan Doyle, and made him an offer of fixed fees for some lectures and a percentage of the box office for others. ACD agreed to go on tour from the beginning of October until the first of December. (In the end he stayed a few days extra.) He landed in New York on October 2, accompanied by twenty-one-year-old Innes Doyle, taking leave from the British Army to be his older and famous brother’s traveling companion throughout the tour.
Conan Doyle stepped off his ship into a land that perhaps was stranger to him than he realized. His idea of America had been shaped largely by his childhood reading, including the frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid and the historical works of Francis Parkman; and as soon as he had the opportunity, he headed north to what he liked to call “Parkman Land,” the territory in and around the Adirondacks where the French and Indian War had been fought. In this region nearly every name was magic to him: Fort Edward, Bloody Pond, Ticonderoga. Now he was able to compare the genuine terrain with the descriptions he had already drawn in his novel The Refugees, much of it set in this borderland between America and Canada. “It was very much as I had pictured it,” he reported later, “but the trees were not as large as I thought.”
For a few days he was able to indulge himself as a tourist. He had hoped to do one other thing early in his American trip: pay a respectful visit to Boston and shake hands with Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great old man of American literature, whose name he had borrowed for his own detective. But Oliver Wendell Holmes died on October 7, 1894, at the age of eighty-five, while ACD was deep in the northern woods, staying at a six-bedroom hunting lodge near Saranac Lake made available by a friend of a friend. By the time he emerged from Parkman Land and was able to visit Boston, the best he could do was to place a wreath on Holmes’s grave.
It is exhausting just to list the places Conan Doyle visited during his lecture tour that fall. He spoke repeatedly in New York and Chicago, and made single appearances in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Washington, Baltimore, Elmira, Glens Falls, Schenectady, Jersey City, and some twenty other places. He gave the same lecture thirty-four times in two months, and other lectures or readings a total of five times, and the biggest variation seems to have been the opinions of local reporters about what his accent was like. One of them called it “a mixture of English, Irish, Scottish, and cold,” and it is no wonder if he came down with a virus after so many nights consisting of straining his voice to speak in a gigantic hall, being delivered to the railway station at midnight, catching a few hours’ sleep aboard a train, arriving in a new city the next morning, seeing a few of the local attractions, having dinner with local literary figures or social climbers, then lecturing once again, and repeating the process, day after day with few breaks.
A typical day of the trip was Thursday, November 1, when ACD travelled from Boston to Worcester, Massachusetts. He was a guest of the Woman’s Club of Worcester, which had invited him to give one of the lectures in the series it was sponsoring that season. All 827 seats in the downtown Association Hall were filled when Conan Doyle appeared at eight o’clock on a stage decorated with large palms, ferns, and white chrysanthemums. The speaker was introduced by the president of the club, the wife of a local manufacturer and state legislator, and she explained Conan Doyle to the audience as “the author of those famous detective stories which have entertained, delighted, and mystified two continents.” After the lecture, which lasted about an hour, the ladies carried their guest off to a reception at the home of another local industrialist and his wife. Arthur and Innes, as well as the leaders of the Woman’s Club, shook the hands of about 175 people in the receiving line before there was finally a chance for some rest. Experiences of this kind, in which local dignitaries missed no opportunity to meet the celebrity author, were repeated day after day through the exhausting ten weeks of the trip.
As for Conan Doyle’s lecture itself, it was the same almost every night, under the title “Readings and Reminiscences.” He had come to North America hoping to give several literary talks in rotation, including one about the novelist George Meredith, whom he considered to be the greatest author of his time-but sponsors and audiences were not interested in George Meredith. What they wanted to hear about was Sherlock Holmes, and Holmes is what his obliging creator talked about, time and again. Newspaper reports of his successive lectures quote various sentences and paragraphs, to the point that it is possible to reconstruct the entire hour’s ramble about how he became an author, together with some comments on Holmes and some on the writing of his historical novels. Many sentences and whole paragraphs of his talk later found their way into his autobiography, Memories and Adventures.
Here is one anecdote from childhood mentioned only briefly in the autobiography, but told more fully in the lecture from 1894: “I can remember that into the little flat in which we lived there came one day a great man-gigantic he seemed when viewed from the height of two-foot-nothing. His shoulders, I remember, spanned the little door and his head was somewhere up near the gas chandelier. His voice, too, was as big as his body and I have since learned that his heart was in the same proportion. I can still remember the face of the man, clean-shaven, pugilistic, with an old man’s hair, a young man’s eyes, and a child’s laugh. Above all I remember his nose, which fascinated me by its strange distortion. Long after I had been tucked into my little crib I could hear him roaring and rumbling in the next room, and his bare personality left as vivid an effect upon my three-year-old mind as his name and fame could do upon the thousands who knew him as William Makepeace Thackeray.”