I love a good mystery. I’m talking about books. Heck, I love mystery shows and movies too. A whodunit.
The kind of mystery I don’t care for is when I’ve put something away somewhere, and when I go to use it, I can not find the thing for the life of me. At the time I “put it in its place,” I had a perfectly good reason for placing it so thoughtfully. But my thinking must change over time because every so often when I go to find the item again, it is a complete and total mystery.
Regardless of my own life mysteries, I like those book mysteries that really make the mind work. The wondering. The speculation. That big twist at the end.
This comes to mind because on this date, October 14, 1892, “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” was published. The book was the first collection of Holmes stories. Doyle had been publishing those stories in magazines since 1887.
Yes. I said, Doyle. Plain old Doyle. His surname did not have Conan in it, to begin with. He had one first name and two middle names — Arthur Ignatius Conan. And, of course, his last name was Doyle. But he changed things upon graduating from high school — to Conan Doyle.
Conan Doyle was born in Scotland. Most people don’t know it, but he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. It was there when he met Dr. Joseph Bell, one of his teachers. That fellow Bell had extraordinary deductive powers. Conan Doyle was so impressed that he partly based Sherlock Holmes on this guy.
It is obvious Conan Doyle became a good writer, but this only happened because he turned out to be a lousy doctor. He set up an ophthalmology practice in London. But he couldn’t get a single patient to walk through his office door. This gave him a lot of time to write.
Whenever I think of Conan Doyle, I picture Basil Rathbone, who played his main character Sherlock Holmes in so many of those movies. Slender, fit, long features. A good-looking guy for the most part. But Conan Doyle looked nothing like Basil. He was a bit on the heavy side, with a square face and a handlebar mustache. Doyle wanted to volunteer as a soldier, but he was not accepted because he was way overweight. Maybe from sitting at his desk writing all the time.
I hate to do the whole spoiler alert thing, but “spoiler alert.” Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock in his books. He killed Sherlock so that he could focus on writing about Spiritualism. He did this the same year his alcoholic father died in an asylum in 1893. Conan Doyle believed heavily in the nether world and was a member of a society called The Ghost Club.
Maybe that was a part of his intrigue with the mysterious.
I share this interest with him. I believe there is much we don’t know — those things our human brains are incapable of comprehending. Our world is filled with these mysteries, and I love every one of them.
Well. Except for the ongoing mystery of where I put the extra garage door opener or the whereabouts of the coffee maker manual.
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Mystery creates wonder, and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.
— Neil Armstrong
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The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself.
— Deepak Chopra
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“Be careful what you wish for. Not all lost things should be found.”
― Moïra Fowley-Doyle
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The big, big mystery. Sure. Lock.
