[ SECRET POST #2597 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2597 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 047 secrets from Secret Submission Post #371.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - titc ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

15. http://i.imgur.com/B359WTK.png

[rubbertea]

I like ACD because he was such a dork. I mean, the man was really into fairies, of all things.

[sarillia]

Someday I would love to write a story about him meeting a real fairy. His interest in them amuses me too.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm, it fits. There was an explosion of fairy-based fiction around that time, if I remember correctly.

[(Anonymous)]

And spiritualism, too. It really beggars belief that the man who invented Sherlock Holmes could just such a gullible moron about believing in seances and mediums to the point of refusing to believe they were fake even when Houdini proved again and again how it was just basic magician's tricks.

[iceyred]

Good gravy, he sounds like a delusional fangirl.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think that's entirely fair - I think (it's been a while since I read his non-SH short stories and thought about it) that he got into spiritualism explicitly looking for solace over his son's death. I mean, he was being gullible, sure, but before that he was pretty rationalist and so it just seems like was desperate to believe that there was an afterlife.

[tweedisgood]

"Steel True, Blade Straight

Arthur Conan Doyle

Knight

Patriot, Physician and Man of Letters"

His epitaph. Pretty good in my book. Also appropriate for a certain Dr Watson.

[(Anonymous)]

This comment made my brain suddenly spawn the headcanon that Holmes turned down that knighthood mentioned in The Three Garridebs because they didn't offer to knight Watson as well.

[intrigueing]

Awwww...I like to think he at least, didn't personally hate Holmes as a character. It seems like he disliked Holmes for being so popular he distracted from all his other work, and he was sick of writing about him, but it's possible he still thought Holmes was a rather cool character? He does put some really charming or personal ideas into Holmes's mouth, which doesn't seem to indicate indifference, at any rate.

And I never heard of him attacking Holmes the way he would a person, not anything like Agatha Christie describing Hercule Poirot as a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep" (for shame!) for example.

Of course he didn't hate Holmes!

[elephantinegrace]

I mean, the character was based off a friend of his (Joseph Bell) and was meant as an honor. It's jsut that he wanted to be remembered as a historian. I'm pretty sure he said something about how if, in a hundred years, he's only remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, he'd consider himself a failure. At which point I laughed so hard I drooled.

Re: Of course he didn't hate Holmes!

[tweedisgood]

And the guy who was taken in by the Cottingley Fairies. That comes up a lot.

[kallanda_lee]

It's possible to like a character but just want to move on to other things, you know.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah. A LOT of the Canon shows every sign of a guy who just could no longer bring himself to even pretend to give a fuck about these characters or stories. I don't think he usually hated Holmes, I think he was just bored and apathetic.

[(Anonymous)]

I kind of feel this way about L. Frank Baum, though his liked was pretty ok iirc. Guy was a rad feminist, too.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, really? I did not know that.

I really need to read more about L. Frank Baum.

[(Anonymous)]

Wasn't he also a hardcore white supremacist who wrote about how all the Native Americans should be driven out?

I like his books, but he's not exactly someone I look up to.

[(Anonymous)]

I've only read his Challenger stuff, so I'm often miffed at Sherlockian shenanigans. They are really hardcore and frankly haven't changed much since ACD's time.

[tweedisgood]

It's simply untrue however that they "bullied him into bringing Holmes back". He did it for the money, after thinking of a cool mystery (Hound), putting Holmes in it as a wizard wheeze and then seeing the cash start to roll in - handy when you've just built a huge home in the country and need to keep it going. When American publishers started offering him the equivalent of thousands of pounds for every short story, no bullying whatever was required.

[(Anonymous)]

It takes a couple of hours at most to read a story. It can take weeks or months to write that one piece. He'd written a ton. Of course he got tired of his character sometimes! Plus he was really hurt nobody was interested in his other work and just wanted "Moar, moar Holmes!" I can really understand that. He needed a break, at the very least.

[(Anonymous)]

He did get, like, a ten year break between the Memoirs and Hound, and another several years between the Return and His Last Bow.

Actually, that may have been worse. To not be able to go "okay, finished with that part of my career, onto the next!" but to have to keep going back again and again until a couple years before he died.

[annethecatdetective]

Count me in on the 'want to hug Conan Doyle' boat. I became a Holmesian at a very young age and it meant a lot to me, and reading about ACD's life after, I was also sad that he had so many hardships, both with his personal life and with wanting to be remembered for his 'serious' work... but on the other hand, I like to think that, in the hereafter, he's gotten to be at peace with the state of his fandom rather than feeling like a failure-- after all, how many people in the years and years since, never would have read his serious works had it not been for Holmes?

[blueonblue]

Have you read Arthur and George? You might like it.

[(Anonymous)]

Looking at his stories, he was a bit of an imperialistic prick, but then again, who in Britain at that time wasn't. I'm not a big fan - I never liked his style much, but I kind of pity him about his friendship with Houdini, though. He just wanted to belie~ve in magic. ;_;

[(Anonymous)]

The whole "wishing to be remembered for his serious work" is pretty common among writers, so wherever he is, he's in good company.

He's probably commiserating with Petrarca and Dante - not Shakespeare, though. Shakespeare would mock them for their artistic pain and they'd call him a hack without a shred of originality and a sell-out....