The Doyle diary: The last great Conan Doyle mystery: With a Holmesian investigation into the strange and curious case of Charles Altamont Doyle

Just leafing through these pages reveals a fascinating worldview, one informed by the fantastic, the sentimental, and sometimes even the surreal. The creative artist here is Arthur Conan Doyle's father, an illustrator of some note, relegated to shamed shadows in family memory -- but why? The answer, at least as interpreted by the editor of this facsimile volume, is alcoholism. It's nothing so shameful now, of course; but to the Victorian world, it was a moral failing, rather than a physical/psychological disease. So the elder Doyle's life was shrouded in the vague diagnosis of "weakness," which was never quite spelled out in blunt terms. But setting that aside, we still have this remarkable sketchbook, filled with often hallucinatory imagery. Was all of it merely a result of a mind muddled by too much drinking? I don't think so. True, the pictures here are often unwittingly revealing of their creator's moods & mindscape -- sometimes you get the feeling Doyle was drawing what he saw in the throes of delirium tremens. Still, there's something more here -- a witty, bemused, amazed depiction of a world in which wonders mingle with the everyday, a world where barriers between the two are uncertain at best, shading into one another. One watercolor, for example, shows us a Victorian infant cradled in the arms of a huge brown-red squirrel. Doyle's caption? "Either this is a precious small Babe, or a monstrous big Squirrel." So we see Victorian fairies & infants in all their innocent sweetness, juxtaposed with a strange world of Nature, often garnished with symbolic figures of Death & Mystery. It's a disorienting world, where the sugary clichés of the era suddenly open into a capricious wonderland. And it's a reminder that beneath the most ordinary, even banal surface, something extraordinary may be lurking. Highly recommended!