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TV
On the case: Historian Lucy Worsley delves into the parallel lives of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes
Lucy Worsley isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty.
In fact, when it comes to the research for her series, she’s all hands on deck.
The British historian takes on a subject that is dear to her — Sherlock Holmes.
As a lifelong fan, she and her team worked for more than a year to find the answer on why Arthur Conan Doyle came to despise the character that made him rich and famous.
Throughout the series, Worsley explores the parallel lives of Doyle and Holmes in the historical context of their times.
From the dying years of Victorian England, through the imperial crisis of the Boer War, the optimism of the early Edwardian years, to the trauma of World War I, Doyle and Holmes lived through them all.
“Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle” will premiere at 7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 8, on New Mexico PBS, channel 5.1. It will also be available to stream on the PBS video app. The second and third installments will air at 7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 15, and Dec. 22, on New Mexico PBS.
“I think that the series establishes quite well that he (Doyle) liked his material pleasures and he liked money,” Worsley said of the author.
Featured in over 60 original stories and countless film and television adaptations, Sherlock Holmes has intrigued and excited fans with his intellect and powers of deduction for more than a century, Worsley said.
Over the course of three episodes, she investigates the curious relationship between detective and author.
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In episode one, “Doctor and Detective,” Worsley unearths Holmes’ origins in Doyle’s early life as a medical student in Edinburgh, Scotland.
She unpacks the early stories, revealing the dark underbelly of late Victorian Britain, from drug use to true crime.
She explores how Doyle infused his stories with cutting-edge technological developments and traces the author’s growing disenchantment with his detective, heading to Switzerland to visit the site of one of the most famous deaths in literature.
There was so much to cover in a long life — 56 short stories and four novels, Worsley said.
“But then we came up with what I think is the genius idea of telling the story of Arthur Conan Doyle and Holmes, sort of as if they’re two characters involved in this fight to the death,” she explained. “And then everything sort of fell into place. At first, Arthur’s doing well, because he decides he wants to kill Sherlock Holmes. Holmes goes over. The ‘Viking’ book falls. That’s the end of him. But then, as you know, if you’ve watched our series, Sherlock Holmes comes back again. He’s alive. And actually, Sherlock Holmes kind of wins, because he’s still alive today.”
Worsley said there continues to be intrigue that surrounds Holmes to this day.
“Everybody wants to know about him,” she said. “He’s still on the TV the whole time. Arthur Conan Doyle, not so much, because he’s quite full of himself. He’s super self-confident. He’s always poking his nose into other people’s business, and he’s ashamed of what I think is this amazing thing that he did, which was to come up with this amazing character who I totally love. I can’t tell you how much I love Sherlock Holmes.”
Worsley said Doyle’s life changed when he loses his son in 1918, just at the end of World War I, and then he gets sucked into this whole world of seances and spiritualism because he wants to see his son again.
“Then I think, ‘OK, you’re human. I really feel for you.’” she said. “In the last decade of his life, when he’s fallen out of fashion. He’s not a commercially successful writer anymore, and he’s pursuing this goal of trying to make everybody in the world believe that spiritualism exists and that there is life beyond death, and that the paranormal is a thing. Then I think, yeah, I feel sorry for him.”
In episode two, “Fact and Fiction,” Worsley explores Doyle’s desire to distance himself from Sherlock after the detective’s apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls. From the delights of the ski slopes to the horrors of the Boer War, she reveals how far Doyle went to make himself the hero of his own story. He even took on the role of detective himself in one of the most important legal cases of the 20th century.
In the finale, “Shadows and Sleuths,” the series investigates the return of Sherlock. Doyle began the Edwardian age delighting in all it had to offer, but as World War I approached, the darkness of the later stories mirrored the reality of Doyle’s life. After losing his eldest son, he became an evangelist for spiritualism, and his star declined after a public spat with a famous magician. Sherlock Holmes, in contrast, found a life beyond his author on stage and screen.
Worsley said this project, like her others, is special.
“Investigating stuff is my life’s work. I really love it,” she said. “If I wasn’t a historian, I think I would have been a detective. I love putting together the pieces of evidence to build up the case. People have the wrong idea about historians and see them as these kind of lonely, heroic individuals going into the archives and finding one key document, sort of like Indiana Jones. What people don’t realize is history is a team sport and we all feel like we’re dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. We worked on this series for more than a year and can’t wait to have it out to the world.”
