Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes by Christopher Redmond

Author:Christopher Redmond
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781459714663
Publisher: Dundurn

Sunday, November 18: A Cheque for S. S. McClure

ACD continues to grumble about how little money he is taking home from his tour, but his complaints are not altogether true: one of these days in New York he will off-handedly write a cheque for five thousand dollars – more than the price of a respectable house. It will be payable to S. S. McClure, the struggling publisher, providing desperately needed capital for the Magazine he is trying to keep afloat. McClure has known of ACD for several years now, having paid sixty dollars apiece for the right to distribute the original dozen Sherlock Holmes stories to American newspapers through his syndicate. They were well received, but he was less fortunate with The White Company, for which he had paid $375, and which he had to resell to the New York Sun.

Meanwhile, McClure has been operating a fifteen-cent monthly magazine, started in 1892 in the hope of succeeding in America as George Newnes’s Strand has done (largely because of ACD’s Holmes tales) in Britain. The old-fashioned magazines – Harper’s, the Century, Scribner’s, the Atlantic – cost twenty-five cents or even more, and there is a growing readership which they do not serve. McClure has kept expenses down by filling the magazine with stories to which he, because of the syndicate, already has the rights, and using the new cheap photo-engraving process rather than traditional hand-engraving to illustrate them. McClure’s has been a literary success, but money has always been a problem – it was launched into the panic of 1893, newspapers have been cutting back on their syndicate material, and the magazine has only made it to the fall of 1894 because of suppliers’ credit and a few generous investments. On top of everything else, it now has competition, in the form of Munsey’s Magazine and John Brisben Walker’s Cosmopolitan, which have undercut the cover price by charging twelve and a half or even ten cents a copy.

At last report McClure is losing a thousand dollars a month, until an event which he will describe in his autobiography:

One cloudy afternoon, when I was on the train going home from the city, I looked up from the manuscript I was reading, and noticed that the weather had lifted and that the sun was shining. Instantly I felt an unaccountable rise of spirits. The next morning, before hurrying away to catch my train, I told my wife that there was no possible chance for our success unless God helped us. Every human source of help was exhausted, and without help we could not go on. I asked her to pray God to help us. She said that I must pray also; but I told her that she could pray better than I could.

Conan Doyle was at this time lecturing in America. On that day he was staying at the Aldine Club. I had been so weighed down by business cares that I had not seen him since his arrival in the United States, and I had a feeling of having neglected him.

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