I love a good mystery. Those Whodunnits. It could be anything. Who killed Moppy McBride? Or who stole the Jewels of Havaburp Castle? I can remember reading the good mysteries of Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown when I was a kid. I fell in love with the genre then.
There are some great mystery writers in the world. Great pioneers too. Like Agatha Christie, and G.K. Chesterton. Edgar Allan Poe. Or. What about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?
Well. I’ll tell you. It was on this date, October 14, 1892, that The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was published. The book was the first collection of Holmes stories, which Conan Doyle had been publishing in magazines since 1887.
First. A bit about the author. Conan Doyle was born in Scotland. He didn’t start out writing. Nope. He was on his way to becoming a doctor in medicine at the University of Edinburgh. It was there at the University where he met Dr. Joseph Bell, a teacher with extraordinary deductive power.
And that turned the tide, I think. Dr. Joseph Bell partly inspired Doyle’s character, Sherlock Holmes, years later.
So. After he graduated, Sir Arthur moved to London. To be a doctor. But his doctoring wasn’t going so great. So he had ample free time to write. His first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887.
And on it went from there.
More interestingly, I think, was his belief and involvement in spiritualism. Or The Netherworld. He was a huge believer in the afterlife, in psychic abilities, and the supernatural. It all started in 1887 when Doyle began a series of investigations into the possibility of psychic phenomena and attended about 20 seances, experiments in telepathy, and sittings with mediums. He declared himself a spiritualist, describing one particular event that convinced him psychic phenomena were real. This continued all throughout his life. One thing after the next. Like the occurrence of his children’s nanny, Lily Loder Symonds, who allegedly had psychic powers.
He died of a heart attack at the age of 71. His last words were directed toward his wife: “You are wonderful.”
At the time of his death, there was some controversy concerning his burial place, as he was avowedly not a Christian, considering himself a Spiritualist. He was first buried in Windlesham rose garden. Later, he was moved to be buried next to his wife at Minstead churchyard in the New Forest, Hampshire.
Also on this date. A much different item. It is the birthday of George Perry Floyd.
George Floyd, a victim of police brutality.
He grew up in Texas, although he was born in North Carolina on October 14, 1973. In 2017, he moved to Minneapolis to be with his mother and make a new start. He was stopped by police officers on May 25, 2020, for allegedly possessing a counterfeit bill. And that would be his death.
A bystander recorded the last minutes of Floyd’s life as he was restrained for nearly nine minutes, pleading for his life, saying “I can’t breathe.” One police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck, and two others held him down. Floyd’s death was eventually ruled a homicide, and the police officers arrested for his murder. There was no mystery there. The entire thing caught on film.
If, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed, there is an afterlife, I wonder what it might be like. Do Arthur and George know each other in this place? Do they talk about their Earthly existence? Do they make sense of it all?
This remains a mystery to all of us. All who are still here.
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“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.”
― Will Rogers
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“I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
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“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
― Walt Whitman
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Mysteries and non-mysteries. Talk it.
