Elementary.

Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, by Daniel Stashower (Holt, 512 pp., $32.50)

Certain facts about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are familiar to everyone who knows anything at all about the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He based Holmes partly on a brilliantly observant diagnostician who had taught him at medical college in Edinburgh. He was irritated by the way in which the vast worldwide success of the Sherlock Holmes stories tended to obscure what he considered his more important work, especially the historical novels, such as The White Company and Sir Nigel; which is why he tried, vainly, to kill Holmes off in the Reichenbach Falls. He espoused a number of public causes, mostly very proper ones, including the exposure, using forensic evidence, of several criminal cases in which there had been a clear miscarriage of justice. Later he became a fervent advocate of spiritualism, a campaign marred, at least in retrospect, by the gullibility with which he accepted the photographs of fairies that two little girls claimed to have taken.

Daniel Stashower's well-researched, well-constructed, and well-written biography neither contradicts nor adds anything of groundbreaking significance to these elementary facts. Confidence is rather shaken at the start when Stashower, and indeed the index, refer to Conan Doyle's second wife as "Lady Jean," as though she were the daughter of an earl (which she was not), instead of "Lady Conan Doyle," the wife of a knight (which she was). More curiously, he bungles one of the hoariest of schoolboy jokes. ("When is a door not a door?" "When it's a-jar.") Most inexcusably, there is only a selective, not a complete, bibliography of Conan Doyle's published work.

To deduce major faults from these minor ones, however would be unfair. Conan Doyle's personality-he was a big, genial, generous man with a ready sense of dry humor-is fully brought out and the narrative garnished with much unfamiliar detail. I never knew (or, if I did, I'd forgotten) that the name "Holmes" was probably taken from Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom Conan Doyle greatly admired; or that his early effusions, even after the publication of A Study in Scarlet, included, for the Gas and Water Gazette, an English version of a German article snappily entitled "Testing Gas Pipes for Leakage." I was pleased to learn that he had a low opinion of modern art and, having stood unsuccessfully for Parliament, an even lower one of the "vile business" of electioneering.

Such views occasionally make Stashower uneasy. "Modern readers," he warns, "may shake their heads" at Conan Doyle's defense of boxing. ("Better that our sports should be a little too rough than that we should run the risk of effeminacy.") Not this modern reader.

Stashower, himself a member of the Society of Psychical Research ("a cordial disbeliever," in his own words), gives a particularly full account of Conan Doyle's involvement with spiritualism; an emphasis of which Conan Doyle would have thoroughly approved. I'm less sure that he adequately conveys, to anyone who hasn't read them lately, the allure of Conan Doyle's earlier books-the charm and humor of the Brigadier Gerard stories, the authentically heroic mood of the medieval romances. Because Stashower's approach is more sober and scholarly, he lacks the imaginative fire that illumined John Dickson Carr's 50-year-old biography. Both books tell us how important the concept of chivalry was to Conan Doyle, but Carr made us feel what it meant. And Stashower would never have added Carr's bitter comment (he was writing under the oppressive regime of Britain's postwar Labour government) that the White Company's cry "We are free Englishmen" echoes back "with sad nostalgia in this year 1947."

Ironically, the passage of time has turned the Sherlock Holmes stories into Conan Doyle's most vivid historical fiction. Although the last of them did not appear until 1927, they are rooted forever amid the gaslight and hansom cabs of the 1890s. It was a wonderful period for archetypal characters and storytellers. Holmes stands-at the head, unchallengeably-of a company that includes Dr. Fu-Manchu, Dracula, Father Brown, Raffles, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Beau Geste, Svengali, Peter Pan, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Among Conan Doyle's fellow craftsmen were Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Anthony Hope, John Buchan, and H. G. Wells. "The final decade of his life," says Stashower, "saw the publication of Lady Chatterly's Lover, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, and To the Lighthouse." Has any of those (one is tempted to say overrated) books given as much joy, or stuck in as many memories, as The Hound of the Baskervilles?

That his two principal biographers should both be Americans would have given Conan Doyle (who knows, perhaps does give him) great pleasure, for there was one other noble cause that he espoused, not yet mentioned. At the front of the book he loved best, The White Company, he wrote: "To the hope of the future, the reunion of the English- speaking races, this little chronicle of our common ancestry is inscribed."

Mr. Lejeune is an NR contributing editor.