Lucy Worsley's Holmes vs. Doyle

Lucy Worsley: Arthur Conan Doyle is a grieving father.

His firstborn son Kingsley survived the First World War, only to be killed by the 1918 flu pandemic.

Like thousands of other bereaved parents, Arthur has enlisted the help of a medium.

He's desperate to reach out to his lost child beyond the grave.

What happens next will alter the course of Arthur's life.

Man: We ask of you, those who now exist beyond the veil, to hear us.

Can you hear me, Kingsley?

Are you there?

Oh!

He's here.

Kingsley, is that you?

That was unexpected, seems completely out of character.

Arthur Conan Doyle-- scientifically trained medical doctor, creator of the super rational Sherlock Holmes-- had become a person who believed in the paranormal, and not just ghosts.

He believed that the living and the dead could communicate.

Would Arthur's new beliefs change his super sleuth?

On the 26th of September, 1903, Sherlock fans woke up to some exciting news.

Danke schoen.

Danke.

Worsley, voice-over: A short story had been published involving an evil mastermind, a faked death, and the return to a notorious waterfall.

The author, of course, was Arthur Conan Doyle, and he'd done something shocking.

He'd finally given in to the pressure, and he brought his master detective Sherlock Holmes back from the dead.

He was back for good.

There was just one little problem.

At the climax of the story "The Final Problem," published 10 years earlier, Sherlock and his arch nemesis Moriarty had fought to the death right here.

In the end, both of them had tumbled down into these swirling waters.

Holmes's body had never been found, which does make me think that perhaps Arthur was leaving the door open just a crack for Holmes to return.

Otherwise, he'd have killed him off good and proper, wouldn't he, having him shot in the head, something definitive.

Arthur's loyal readers had speculated for years that Sherlock wasn't really dead, and now they were proved right, but how on earth had the detective survived the Reichenbach Falls?

[Birds chirping] This is how Arthur has Sherlock explain his survival.

Now, this is desperately unlikely, but just go with the flow.

Ha ha!

"I have some knowledge," Sherlock says, "of baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling," so he used this Japanese system of wrestling to get Moriarty himself over the edge, and then, "with a horrible scream," Moriarty "kicked madly for a few seconds," "clawed the air" with his hands, and then down he went.

This is classic Arthur, adopting the latest new trend for wrestling and using it for his cliffhanger, except that he got the spelling wrong.

Have a look at this.

I bet this is where Arthur got the idea from.

It's an article from "Pearson's Magazine."

Arthur was a contributor to that magazine, and it came out just before Arthur wrote the story.

It's about a "new art of self-defense"--bartitsu.

The pictures are fabulous.

They show you how to do it.

Ha ha!

There's all sorts of swashbuckling going on here, and that must have been how Sherlock Holmes got Moriarty over the edge, and then Holmes climbed up the cliff face to safety.

Yeah, right.

Oh, it's all just crumbling away.

No.

You couldn't climb that.

This revival of Sherlock was very farfetched, but readers were so eager to see their detective back in action, they didn't care.

For me, though, the really interesting question is not how Arthur Conan Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead.

It is why.

I think a significant clue was to be found in the changing world around him.

By 1903, a brave, new century of science had begun, complete with planes, trains, and automobiles.

Arthur was embracing everything the new Edwardian age had to offer.

In fact, he was living his best Edwardian life.

Worsley: Off we go!

Whoo hoo!

Worsley, voice-over: This family footage reveals that, even though he was now in his 40s and a father of 5, Arthur was still a boy racer...

Faster, faster!

Worsley, voice-over: and he was enjoying spending his Sherlock fortune, and this is one of Arthur's shiny, new acquisitions-- a 10-horsepower Wolseley.

Ha ha!

As we know, Arthur never did anything without writing to his mam about it, and here's what he had to say.

"It will be a great, new interest in my life.

It is a real beauty," and then he also says, "I will be very careful.

Even Jean"-- that's his wife-- "is satisfied that I won't hurt myself."

[Tires screech] [Crash] Arthur then crashed his car twice, once with his mam on board-- they ran into a wagonload of turnips-- and the second time, he drove into the gate of his own house with his brother in the car.

The car flipped right over.

Luckily, nobody was hurt, but Arthur's mam was pretty unimpressed.

Undeterred, Arthur bought a replacement car.

He splashed out on the latest Roc motorcycle to roar around the country lanes, and he treated himself to a flight on a hot-air balloon.

It's often said that it was pressure from readers that brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead, and there is some truth in that, but in reality, it was also because Arthur's money was running away.

It was flowing through his fingers like water.

This might explain why Arthur was keen to engage with the American publishers "Collier's Weekly" when they offered him an obscene amount of money for 13 new Holmes stories.

$45,000 seems to be the figure finally agreed.

That's roughly $1.6 million today.

Arthur was now one of the highest paid authors in the world, and he was under no illusion about what all that cash was for.

It was to give the readers exactly the Sherlock Holmes they craved.

The ingredients were a tricky plot, some Holmesian deduction, a bit of science.

The world had to be left a safer place at the end of the story, and then, ideally, there'd be a disguise... so how did the first story in the new collection, 1903's "The Empty House," measure up?

It weaves together Sherlock's return with a classic murder mystery.

In fact, it was so classic that Arthur was upcycling a plot that he'd used at least twice before-- the locked-room mystery where the victim is found inside a room, the door locked on the inside.

Nobody could get in.

Nobody could get out.

So far, so familiar, but how did Sherlock solve this new case?

I'm restaging the crime with Jonathan Ferguson, the keeper of firearms at the Royal Armouries.

Here comes the head of Sherlock Holmes.

In "The Empty House," Sherlock catches the killer, a member of Moriarty's gang, by setting a trap with a dummy of himself as bait.

I don't find that totally convincing as a head.

Do you?

I know what'll make all the difference.

That will.

There we are, absolutely unmistakable.

We know Arthur was obsessed with the latest technology, which fed into his new Sherlock stories, but I'm wondering if his science stands up to scrutiny.

Dr. Watson describes this gun that the assassin has got.

It appeared to be a stick, but it's made out of metal and he puts it together, "ending...in a powerful click."

Well, it's almost Hollywood, isn't it, sort of what we call a takedown sniper rifle today.

A takedown sniper rifle.

They wouldn't call it that then.

Something similar is this, and this is Giffard's-- or Paul Giffard, I guess, because he's French originally.

Oh, yes-- Giffard.

Yeah, and it's in all the papers-- the national papers and local papers, even-- but from 1890 to '94, when the story is set, he's set up a factory in the UK and is making and selling these.

So this is the most exciting new gun in London, and he's put something like it in the story.

Between those 4 years, it absolutely is, yes, and it's using this newfangled new gas, so it's an air weapon, we would call it, but it's CO2, or, as they called it then, carbonic acid gas.

Well, let's put Arthur to the test and see if his scenario is actually going to work-- the air rifle, Sherlock Holmes, and the window in between because they're firing across the street and through the window.

That's what makes this thing super powerful by Victorian standards, so it's got to go through a pane of glass, through someone's head, and then flatten on a wall behind.

A rifle of the period would do that.

Yeah.

Could an air rifle?

Worsley, voice-over: According to the story, when the assassin fired, there was a strange, loud whizz... [Gunshot] and a long, silvery tinkle of broken glass.

At that instant, Holmes sprang like a tiger onto the marksman's back.

To give me a fighting chance at hitting the dummy Holmes from the right distance, Jonathan has upgraded my air rifle.

Is that--that about it?

Ferguson: That'll do it.

Now, the baddie in the story was the best shot in the Eastern Empire, which meant he was always killing tigers in India.

I got it.

I got it, so, well, can I go now?

Ooh!

Ooh, straight through the window.

Look at the jelly quivering.

Oh, I got him.

I got him.

Hee.

I'll take that.

Well, it's broken the glass, and I heard the tinkle of glass that Dr. Watson describes, and what's happened to the bullet, then?

Oh, look.

It's there in the middle.

Just over halfway through, which is pretty impressive.

And would an actual air gun at the time have been able to fire such a bullet, or is that Arthur's fantasy?

It's a reach from the commercially available air weapons of the day.

I think you'd have to have it custom made with custom ammo supplied, realistically speaking.

So what Arthur's doing is his thing of taking all the coolest new things and kind of smashing them together and making a fantasy gun.

Like any good author of fiction.

[Glass tinkles] Worsley: Well, this was back to business as usual, the winning formula.

Sherlock Holmes had got his man, restored order, and used this fantastical weapon that was so ahead of its time that only a super-modern gun can replicate its performance.

[Barking] Good.

That's a good lad.

Worsley, voice-over: Sherlock wasn't the only one regenerating.

Arthur's character and personality were undergoing a dramatic and unexpected change.

Arthur had a new life, too, a new passion for investigating life after death.

Worsley, voice-over: This is Arthur Conan Doyle's home-- Undershaw in Surrey.

It was here he embraced a new craze sweeping the nation-- spiritualism.

The phone was taken off the hook.

The lights were dimmed, and the medium would try to contact the spirit world.

All sounds a bit implausible, doesn't it, but Arthur Conan Doyle had always been open to new ways of thinking.

After all, it had always been a big part of his writing success, and Arthur admitted he'd actually been investigating spiritualism on the quiet since the 1880s.

Curiously enough, my first experiences in that direction were just about the time when Sherlock Holmes was being built up in my mind, so nobody can say that I formed my opinions on psychic matters very hastily.

Worsley: Arthur's beliefs seemed totally at odds with the extreme rationalism of his detective.

When word got out, fans the world over were bewildered.

How could the creator of the logical and scientific Holmes believe in ghosts?

In response, Arthur did some scientific study of his own.

In the early 1900s, Arthur began to put together a collection of arcane artifacts.

It was all designed to build a case, the case that there was life after death and that spiritualism was real.

I'm hoping to get my hands on this treasure trove of stuff because I think it might open a little window into Arthur's mind.

To a magpie like Arthur who collected shiny, new things and shiny, new ideas, was spiritualism just the latest craze to investigate?

Woman: Let's have a look.

Worsley, voice-over: I've enlisted Professor Christine Ferguson to guide me through Arthur's so-called evidence.

Ferguson: OK, so...

Ghosts.

a lot of amazing spirit photographs.

What are these pictures?

Different kinds.

Can I take this one out?

Please do.

Gosh, this is creepy.

This is quite disturbing.

They're sort of holding her down, and she doesn't-- She looks like she's out of it.

She's in a trance or something.

Yeah.

These are unsettling images.

What on earth is going on in that one?

Is that a spirit photo?

Well, I mean, I think this photograph here represents ectoplasm or teleplasm.

Is that ectoplasm?

That is definitely ectoplasm.

Yes!

There it is.

That is one of the most famous ectoplasmic mediums that Doyle worked with, was aware of, who really championed her-- Kathleen Goligher.

It looks awfully like the Loch Ness Monster.

It certainly does.

People like Doyle are really interested in spirit photography because they think, "Finally, this will be the concrete, "visual, material evidence "that will convince everyone else.

"I don't have to tell you what I've seen "and you'll say that I'm deluded or irrational.

Let me show you these photographs.

Aha."

What's that?

Is it a ghostly presence?

These are ghostly presences, and I believe if you turn it on the side, it looks to be part of a face here.

Is that the face?

Yes.

Can you see it?

It's on its side, a big face on-- Yes, yes.

It looks like some error has happened, to me, in the photography process.

Well, you or I might think, "An error has happened.

This is a double exposure.

How has that happened?"

but for believers, this is an unseen member who's passed on coming back to join the photograph.

What do you think Sherlock Holmes would make of all of this?

It's a good question.

Sherlock Holmes poses as a logician, ultimate practitioner of the science of deduction and rationality, but he uses some very unorthodox methods himself.

Think about what he does with Watson's watch.

You know, he can look at it and say, "Oh, you know, your dad was an alcoholic."

This is exactly what mediums do when they perform psychometry.

They'll take a handkerchief or a lock of hair.

They'll be able to tell you about the people that it belonged to, so there might not be as big a discrepancy between spiritualist techniques and Holmesian ways of knowing as we think.

Wasn't that fascinating?

I've always thought of rationalist Sherlock Holmes over here and spiritualist mediums over here, but actually, they've got something in common.

Both of them are able to help people with their problems.

Both of them are able to make people feel a bit better.

It seems that Arthur had smuggled spiritualism into Sherlock without the fans even spotting it, and in 1904, he played the same psychometry trick in "The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez."

A pair of glasses are discovered in a dead man's hand, and Sherlock uses them to sketch out who the killer must be.

Arthur was beginning to tamper with his winning Sherlock formula, and his next two adventures, "The Norwood Builder" and "The Solitary Cyclist," began to go off-piste in a different way because there was one crucial element missing.

The editor of "The Strand" complained that these stories didn't have an actual proper crime at the heart of them, and, to be fair, that is the point of a Sherlock Holmes story, but Arthur liked "The Solitary Cyclist" because it varied the formula, it rang the changes.

He wrote to his editor, "My dear Smith, I have gone over "The Cyclist" again.

It strikes me as a dramatic and interesting and original story."

Take that, Mr. Smith.

Worsley, voice-over: Arthur couldn't stand being bored, and it's clear with Sherlock, he was stuck in a formula he wanted to break out of.

Always inventive, Arthur was sketching out a new hero--an explorer called Professor Challenger.

Arthur shared Challenger's, enthusiasm for adventure.

He even dressed up as him.

Arthur never dressed up in a deerstalker, and by his 43rd Sherlock story, "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" from 1910, the detective is so exhausted, he's ordered to rest and take the sea air.

[Gulls squawking] Hmm, it sounds like someone's trying to pension Sherlock Holmes off.

See, what you did there, Arthur, that's not going to work.

Readers were crying out for more Sherlock.

In times of crisis, they turned to the clarity and neat solutions he offered, and a crisis was coming, one that would shake Europe to its core.

[Motor chugging] In 1911, Arthur took part in the International Road Rally, organized by Prince Henry of Prussia.

Arthur and his wife Jean were one of the British driving teams, racing along from Homburg back home to London.

By this time, Arthur's driving skills had improved.

He didn't have any crashes, and the British side won the race.

Here is the little medal that Arthur was awarded, but he was surprised by the hostility of some of the German spectators and the talk of war.

He came home convinced that a storm was brewing.

War eventually broke out in 1914.

90,000 men from the British Expeditionary Force were immediately deployed to France, and, of course, Arthur wanted to be one of them.

He wrote to the War Office, setting out his qualifications.

He said, "Look.

I've got a really loud voice.

It's very useful for drill," but Arthur was now 55.

Despite his loud mouth, the War Office didn't want him.

He was rejected... but Arthur did find a way to get into the thick of the action.

In 1916, the Foreign Office organized a visit to the French and Italian fronts for him to meet and greet the troops.

[Explosions and gunfire] [Gunshot] This is the most extraordinary photograph.

It shows Arthur on the front line, and he looks like a soldier in a uniform, but the thing is, this isn't a real military uniform.

It's one that he invented for himself.

Real soldiers had little crowns just there.

Arthur's has got silver roses instead.

On the one hand, this is funny, you know, dressing up as a soldier, but actually, I find it sad and desperate.

He just can't accept that he's too old and they don't want him.

The person who would motivate the troops wasn't Arthur himself.

It was, of course, his detective.

Yet again, Arthur found himself playing second fiddle to a phantom.

While Arthur was at the front line, he had lunch with a top French general, who said to him, "Oh, Sherlock Holmes, is he a soldier in the British Army?"

An expectant hush fell across the room.

Everybody wanted to hear the answer yes, but Arthur was forced to say, "Um, no.

He's too old for service"... [Explosion] but as things got worse, as the casualties mounted, he began to think that maybe, yes, Sherlock Holmes could play a part in the war.

Fans were desperate for a new Sherlock story, and Arthur saw it as an opportunity, a chance to tear up the formula of the classic whodunit and give Sherlock a new role.

This is the result-- the story "His Last Bow."

It's not actually a detective story.

It's a spy story.

Sherlock Holmes comes out of retirement, and, at the personal invitation of the prime minister, he becomes a secret agent, and he infiltrates a German spy ring.

It's rousing stuff.

It's basically British wartime propaganda.

Readers got a Sherlock who would help them win the war, and Arthur got to write something more challenging.

"There's an east wind coming all the same, "such a wind has never blew on England yet.

"It will be cold and bitter, Watson, "and a good many of us may wither before its blast.

"But it's God's own wind none the less, "and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."

[Birds chirping] [Bell tolling] Sadly, Arthur's personal experience of the war was very different from Sherlock's prediction.

Only weeks before the Armistice, Arthur's eldest son Kingsley, who served in the Army Medical Corps, died from influenza.

This is his final resting place-- Saint Luke's graveyard near Hindhead.

"Captain Kingsley Conan Doyle."

He died in October 1918, just a few weeks before his 26th birthday.

Arthur was devastated, but he was confident he would make contact with Kingsley soon because of his strong belief in spiritualism.

Oh!

[Man pants] He's here.

Arthur: Oh, my dear, are you happy?

Worsley: In the aftermath of the First World War, Arthur's belief in spiritualism was spreading across a grieving nation.

Almost a million men had lost their lives, and the thought that they were living on in a parallel world, that you could still talk to them, must have been truly comforting.

It was for Arthur's wife Jean, who became an automatic writer, receiving messages.

from the other side, but it was Arthur who was changed the most.

Losing his son and experiencing the front had shaken Arthur's faith in humanity, so how would the trauma of war affect Arthur and his detective?

[Birds chirping] Arthur was now fascinated by seances rather than sleuths, and he took a 4-year break from writing Sherlock... but eventually, in 1921, he went back to Baker Street and began "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes," the final 12 stories.

There's a lot of weirdness in the later Sherlock Holmes stories.

There are vampires, bit of sci-fi, bit of horror.

To Sherlock Holmes fans who liked Holmes' rationality, this must have seemed like a really strange new departure.

Had Arthur and Sherlock gone over to the dark side?

[Bird squawking] [Whooshing and wailing] Someone who's embraced this weirdness is Professor Janice Allan.

Worsley: Why do the Sherlock Holmes stories in the 1920s turn dark?

I think the potential for darkness was always there in Doyle, but there's no doubt that it comes to the fore in the later stories, and I think it's safe to say that those stories reflect the horror and the trauma of the war, so we get irrational and violent behavior, and we get men, women, even children, acting like wild beasts, doing terrible things to each other.

In "The Retired Colourman," you have a gas chamber that a man builds in his house to murder his adulterous wife.

That's almost like a horror story.

It's not very family- friendly entertainment.

It isn't.

It isn't.

We also see in the post-war stories a proliferation of damaged and mutilated bodies.

Oh, war trauma in fiction.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Tell me about the story that I think of as being about Viagra.

This is from "The Creeping Man," which is probably one of the best known stories from "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes."

The elderly scientist in question, Professor Presbury, has fallen in love with a younger woman who objects to the age difference between them.

Trying to reverse the effects of time, Presbury starts to inject himself with monkey serum, in effect to kind of regain his vitality and his youth.

Now, as mad as that actually sounds, there was a craze in the 1920s for older elderly men to even have transplanted into their systems monkey testicle as a kind of miraculous regeneration cure... Yeah.

but in this story, the monkey serum actually makes Professor Presbury revert into something like a monkey, a lower life form.

It's so horrific.

I know.

He starts creeping along the corridors...

He does.

He's walking on all fours.

climbing up things.

Well, he climbs up very disturbingly to his daughter's window... Yeah.

and what Doyle seems to be suggesting is that Presbury has turned away from all the higher elements that make us human, and has debased himself in materialism and sensuality.

Janice, I think these 1920s stories are really brilliant, but they don't have a good reputation, do they, in the Sherlock Holmes canon?

They don't.

Two of the features that made the earlier stories so popular, you had an almost infallible detective who offered certainty, answers, and you had a depiction of England as a strong, healthy nation.

Both of those features are missing from many of the postwar stories, so instead of that, what we get are damaged psyche, moments of almost existential angst.

Readers didn't know what to do with that, and they didn't like it.

[Birds chirping] Worsley: Readers clearly found these later stories disturbing.

They didn't like the new darkness.

They basically didn't want Arthur messing with their beloved, familiar Sherlock Holmes.

"Bring back the old, rational, scientific Holmes," was the cry from fans.

The last thing they needed was to rehash the horrors of the First World War.

They needed escapism, but Arthur wasn't listening... so what did the fans do instead?

Well, they started to drift away from Arthur and towards a more familiar version of Sherlock.

Film studios had been sniffing around the detective for a while, and in the 1920s, 45 short films were made by the Stoll Company.

They're now being restored to their former glory by Bryony Dixon and the team at the British Film Institute.

Bryony, what have you got in your big, round tin?

So what we have here is one of the episodes of a series called "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" called "His Last Bow," so we have here pictures of Eille Norwood, who was to be the star of the series.

He's a very distinguished theater actor.

"We want you to undertake a very delicate task for the Secret Service..." "which cannot be entrusted to anyone else."

Oh, Sherlock Holmes is going to save the nation.

Yes.

He's been a detective.

Now he's a master spy.

Bit of James Bond, really.

It is.

It's very James Bond.

He escapes from Conan Doyle very early "Escapes."

into the film world.

Worsley: In the Stoll films, Sherlock Holmes is like a superhero.

There's no case too complex.

There's no enemy too cunning to escape him.

The story that's being filmed here is "The Final Problem," which is set in Reichenbach in Switzerland, and it gives an opportunity for Sherlock Holmes to show the Action Man side of himself.

Worsley, voice-over: Film critic Ellen E. Jones has charted Sherlock's evolution away from his creator.

So, Ellen, what aspects of Sherlock Holmes do we know from the films rather than the original stories?

Well, perhaps one of the most famous catchphrases of Sherlock Holmes, the most famous catchphrase of Sherlock Holmes, is "Elementary, my dear Watson," and that actually never appears in Conan Doyle's stories at all.

It comes originally, we think, from the 1899 stage play, which was written by William Gillette, and he also starred as Sherlock in the play, but I suspect that it really-- really, we can credit it being so famous with the film, the first talkie Sherlock, which came out in 1929, and that was called "The Return of Sherlock Holmes."

It had Clive Brook playing the famous detective.

That uses the line "Elementary, my dear Watson," and I think that's probably where it becomes imprinted in people's minds.

Worsley: This catchphrase now took on a life of its own.

It simply wasn't a Sherlock film without hearing the great detective utter the words... Oh, elementary, my dear Watson.

Elementary, my dear Watson.

Elementary.

How do you think that the creator, though, Arthur Conan Doyle, felt with people messing with his character?

I mean, he lost-- Yeah.

He had no control over how Sherlock was going to be depicted.

Jones: Well, we know that he did approve of Eille Norwood.

He said that he was masterly and that, I think his phrase was, "He has a brooding eye which excites expectation," which is a wonderful compliment, isn't it?

I wish someone would say that about me, so he liked Eille Norwood in the role, but what he did disapprove of was the updating of the material.

He felt that it should stay true to the Victorian Sherlock Holmes, and here you can see there's newfangled things like telephones and motorcars and stuff like that, which he wouldn't have enjoyed.

Worsley: So I suppose when Sherlock leaps out of the book and onto the screen, that's really where Arthur Conan Doyle has to let go of him.

I think something that feels very modern is this idea of the creator being in competition for control of his creation, not with even the creation himself, but with the fans, so at the moment, we talk a lot about how social media has given the fans this kind of, perhaps, unwarranted and definitely unhelpful sense of entitlement to creative control over their characters, but actually, that was happening, or certainly Conan Doyle felt that pressure from fans, way back.

Wow, so a really successful fictional character somehow connects with such a wide slice of society that society thinks it owns this character.

Absolutely.

Well, they are entitled because I'm a fan, and I feel that I own Sherlock.

You're one of those possessive fans, I see.

Yes.

He belongs to me.

I'll drink to that.

He does.

Worsley: Arthur had created Sherlock, but it's clear to me it was his new life on stage, screen, even in fan fiction that was turning the master detective into one of the world's most famous and recognizable characters.

By now, Arthur was happy to let others create their own versions of Sherlock and to bask in the financial glory.

He was using the cash to pursue his evangelical passion for spiritualism.

In 1922, he sailed for the United States to spread the word.

He took part in seances and fought with prominent skeptics.

He was front-page news.

There's Arthur Conan Doyle-- with his mustache and his big, white waistcoat on the right-- sat next to his friend Harry Houdini at a party for magicians.

Harry Houdini was one of the most famous magicians in the world at this time, wowing audiences by escaping from a straitjacket in 2 1/2 minutes, and he knew all the tricks of the trade.

If you ask me, these two were rather an odd couple of friends.

Arthur believed that Houdini had powers, whereas Houdini was an arch skeptic.

He didn't believe in spiritualism at all, wanted nothing to do with it.

Arthur was clearly using his fame to try to convert big names to the spiritualist cause, but courting a high-profile skeptic like Houdini was a risky strategy.

I've come to meet actor, writer, and magician Nick Mohammed, who can't resist emulating Houdini's card skills.

I'm going to show you a card trick.

I feel that this is the kind of card trick that both Houdini and Doyle would have found very intriguing because I think, on the one hand, it's a trick that could be explained in a completely rational way, but on the other hand, it's also a trick where you think, "Oh, maybe there is something sort of mystical at play here"... Psychic powers.

possibly psychic powers, so here's what we're gonna try and do, is go through the whole deck, keep it face down.

If you think or you got a feeling that this card is black-- if you think it's black, you got to put it there.

Think it's red, put it there.

I just want you to allow yourself, sort of mind to sort of just be quite free.

Just sort of always try and feel-- Feel the Force.

feel the thing, feel the thing that it might be.

Ooh, that feels red.

My only word of advice would be that we are going through the whole deck.

So hurry up.

No, not at all.

Worsley, voice-over: This card trick is a bit of fun, but it goes to the crux of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini's relationship.

For Houdini, spiritualist mediums used sleight of hand, clever party tricks, whereas Arthur had faith that higher powers were at play.

That's it.

OK. Great stuff, so we're saying these are the red cards.

Are they the red cards?

That's red.

That's red.

[Gasps] That's red.

That's red, as well.

That's red.

Oh, my Lord, Lucy, this is-- So you separated all the reds from all of the black cards.

Did you know that you could do that?

Oh, I like this trick.

He's made me feel special.

Well, there you go.

I don't know how you did it, so, yeah, it is special.

That's magic.

Ha ha ha!

Da da There you go.

Worsley: Why did Arthur Conan Doyle invest so much in Houdini becoming a spiritualist?

He really wanted Houdini to go over to being a spiritualist.

It's a funny, old thing.

I feel like he wanted somebody like Houdini sort of to be part of the cause because, you know, Houdini was a famous magician, escapologist and, you know, having someone like him on the side who believed in this sort of, you know, psychic phenomena would be brilliant.

It'd be a real coup, and it'd really sort of support his cause, and I think that Houdini would have been a very good convert because he was so famously a skeptic, and, you know, he would go around, and he would debunk a lot of fraudulent psychics, which is, you know, one thing and maybe should be applauded.

Worsley, voice-over: Things came to a head in Atlantic City on the 18th of June, 1922.

Mohammed: Doyle had forewarned Houdini that, you know, some of his spiritualist friends might be there at this gathering and they might do a seance, and I think Houdini was really willing to engage with it and to sort of believe, so they sat down, and Lady Doyle did her thing, got possessed, and sort of did-- I don't know why I'm doing an impression; it maybe didn't look like that-- did the right thing, and it was allegedly a message from Houdini's mother, who had passed away.

Instantly, Houdini knew that this was a load of rubbish because, A, his mum was Hungarian-- this was written in English-- and also, she was Jewish and there was a crucifix and so on on the page.

So Arthur Conan Doyle just pushed his spiritualism so far onto Houdini, who didn't want to receive it, that they fell out.

I think Doyle was really pushing Houdini on, "Why don't you believe?

Why don't you believe?

"Why are you effectively making a career out of debunking this psychic phenomena?"

so I think it just got to a point where Houdini just became so frustrated and Doyle was very much sort of writing publicly his displeasure in what Houdini was doing, and it just forced this correspondence between them that just-- It just sort of blew up with Houdini just eventually saying, "I just think this guy is senile.

"He's sort of bamboozled easily, "and, you know, this is all trickery, and I'm yet to see any evidence at all."

Worsley, voice-over: The shockwaves from the Atlantic City seance were felt around the world.

Arthur's reputation was tarnished, and many now dismissed spiritualism as a hoax, but Arthur was indomitable.

His response was to double down.

Arthur clearly had an uphill battle on his hands getting the spiritualist message out, so it does seem quite natural that he might consider enlisting the help of one of his fictional characters.

There were a couple of good options, of course, including Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes had done a great job of selling the British cause in "His Last Bow," that wartime propaganda story.

Would Holmes do the job again?

But Sherlock Holmes wasn't the only contender.

Professor Challenger had been a huge hit in Arthur's dinosaur adventure "The Lost World."

This was the book that would go on to inspire "Jurassic Park."

Worsley: This is great.

Will you lead me into your lost world, please, Dan?

Yes, certainly, laid on some dinosaurs for you.

Ha!

Fabulous.

Worsley, voice-over: I'm hoping author Daniel Stashower can give me an insight into Arthur's big decision.

So we know that Arthur wants to spread the word about spiritualism.

He has Professor Challenger in his arsenal, but he also has Sherlock Holmes.

What happens?

Sherlock Holmes would have made a bigger splash, but Professor Challenger made more sense.

Professor Challenger was a brawler.

He knew what it was to put across a difficult idea.

He'd already done it with the dinosaurs.

He'd been laughed at by the scientific community, but he'd proven himself right, and now Conan Doyle hoped in "The Land of Mist" that he could do the same with spiritualism.

Now, Dan, I've got a sneaking suspicion that on some level, Arthur maybe sensed that it would be commercial suicide to make Sherlock Holmes go over to spiritualism.

The fans wouldn't like it, really.

I'm sure you're right, Lucy, and my Sherlock Holmes friends tend to go a little green around the gills when the idea is even suggested, but Conan Doyle once said that he would gladly sacrifice whatever literary reputation he may have accrued if it would bring about a greater acceptance of his spiritualist message.

I really think if he thought that Sherlock Holmes was the one thing that would pull the lever, he'd have done it.

Worsley: In "The Land of Mist," Professor Challenger himself becomes a spiritualist, but the book was not the commercial hit that Arthur had hoped for.

Fans would never know how close Sherlock came to conversion, but they were losing faith with Arthur, anyway.

I found something from 1926 which I think sums up the public mood.

[Chuckles] This is a cartoon from the satirical magazine "Punch," and it shows an elderly Arthur lost in a kind of crazy, spiritualist haze, but, look, he is chained to a tiny, angry Sherlock Holmes, and below, there's a poem.

"Your own creation, that great sleuth "Who spent his life in chasing Truth-- "How does he view your late defiance (O ARTHUR!)

of the laws of Science?"

and the message is that the fans believed Sherlock would have disapproved of the spiritualism, just as so many of them did themselves.

Poor, old Arthur, he just can't escape the judgment of the superfans.

He's shackled to them, perhaps for life.

In later years, Arthur continued to be evangelical about spiritualism.

He could never understand how the public believed wholeheartedly in Sherlock Holmes, who was totally imaginary, yet refused to believe in phenomena Arthur felt he had evidence to prove.

But the curious thing is how many people around the world are perfectly convinced that he is a living human being.

I get letters addressed to him.

I get letters asking for his autograph, get letters addressed to his rather stupid friend Watson.

I've even had ladies writing to say that they'd be very glad to act as his housekeeper.

Worsley: In March 1927, Arthur published his very last Sherlock story-- "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place," one final creeper involving a racehorse and the ashes of a human hand.

Arthur then closed the door on 221B Baker Street... forever.

Oh, old, chap.

Well, good-bye.

Come along.

Come on, boy.

Worsley: Arthur Conan Doyle died of a heart attack on the 7th of July, 1930.

He was 71 years old, but his fictional detective Sherlock Holmes lives on.

His stories have been translated into over 90 languages, and Sherlock is the blueprint for 140 years of detective fiction.

I've come to understand that Arthur would have wanted us to remember him as a highbrow novelist, as a campaigner for justice and for spiritualism, but all of that just pales into insignificance beside his creation of Sherlock Holmes.

Ironically, Arthur has achieved life beyond the grave because Sherlock is just never off our screens.

He keeps being reborn for new generations of fans who love him just as much as I do.

Deerstalker moment, I think.

"Lucy Worsley's Holmes vs Doyle" is available on PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video