How Sherlock Pulled the Trick by Brian McCuskey

Author:Brian McCuskey [McCuskey, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: 2021-05-25T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Wonderful Literature, 1930–2020

Death of the Author

Arthur Conan Doyle died on July 7, 1930, after suffering from heart trouble for several months. His death was international front-page news. “Up to the end,” the New York Times reported, “his enthusiasm for psychic investigation was unflagging.”1 That enthusiasm, however, no longer extended to the Society for Psychical Research, from which he had resigned six months earlier, protesting that it had become “simply an anti-spiritualist organisation.”2 The SPR had never gone over to his new revelation, sticking instead to the phenomenal side of spiritualism. “Psychical research,” the physicist William Barrett said after Doyle’s conversion, “may strengthen the foundations but cannot take the place of religion.”3 Doyle felt that the SPR was not even doing that much; he was still angry about its 1922 exposure of the spirit photographer William Hope, whom Doyle nonetheless continued to support. Calling for all its members to join him in resigning, Doyle accused the SPR of doing “essentially unscientific and biased work,” whose aim was “obtuse negation at any cost.”4

Fewer than a hundred members exited with him, but more than six thousand people attended the Royal Albert Hall memorial service on July 13, just as they had flocked to his lectures and debates during the previous decade.5 At those events, Doyle invited audience members to write to him personally about their own séance experiences, documenting phenomena and recording communications. Sent from all over the world, the reports of these “tens of thousands of hard-headed observers” swelled the “enormous volume of evidence, which is recorded in hundreds of books, and thousands of manuscripts,” all collected in Doyle’s library. The existence of so much material was itself “a portentous fact,” hard proof that even skeptics in the SPR could not negate, even if they doubted the portents themselves.6 Doyle then recycled those testimonies in subsequent lectures, where he called for even more feedback, reinforcing his increasingly logic-proof arguments. That loop circumscribed his own authorial position, sitting in his library at the center of the spiritual universe, his infallible word holding together all those texts. Before long, inquirers approached him just as clients approach Sherlock Holmes, seeking answers and reassurances from the one person whose explanations were so total as to seem inspired. Lamond’s prophecy that Doyle would one day be deified was already coming true.7

The thousands of followers assembled at the Albert Hall were hoping for a new portent. The organizers had placed an empty chair, reserved with his name on it, next to his widow. Would Doyle attend his own memorial service? Before long, the presiding medium, Estelle Roberts, interrupted her clairvoyant channeling of condolences to announce, “He is here,” claiming she had just seen Doyle take his seat on the platform. She then passed along a private message from him to Lady Doyle, who later confirmed its evidential value.8 The answer was final: Doyle’s revelation was unflagging. “There is no question that my father will often speak to us,” his son Adrian declared to the press, “just as he did before he passed over.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.