Файл: Конан Дойль и его творчество.pdf

Doyle was friends for a time with Harry Houdini, the American magician who himself became a prominent opponent of the Spiritualist movement in the 1920s following the death of his beloved mother. Although Houdini insisted that Spiritualist mediums employed trickery (and consistently exposed them as frauds), Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers—a view expressed in Doyle's The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini was apparently unable to convince Doyle that his feats were simply illusions, leading to a bitter public falling out between the two. A specific incident is recounted in memoirs by Houdini's friend Bernard M. L. Ernst, in which Houdini performed an impressive trick at his home in the presence of Conan Doyle. Houdini assured Conan Doyle the trick was pure illusion and that he was attempting to prove a point about Doyle not "endorsing phenomena" simply because he had no explanation. According to Ernst, Conan Doyle refused to believe it was a trick.

In 1922, the psychical researcher Harry Price accused the spirit photographer William Hope of fraud. Doyle defended Hope, but further evidence of trickery was obtained from other researchers. Doyle threatened to have Price evicted from the National Laboratory of Psychical Research and claimed if he persisted to write "sewage" about spiritualists, he would meet the same fate as Harry Houdini. Price wrote "Arthur Conan Doyle and his friends abused me for years for exposing Hope." Because of the exposure of Hope and other fraudulent spiritualists, Doyle led a mass resignation of eighty-four members of the Society for Psychical Research, as they believed the Society was opposed to spiritualism.

Doyle and spiritualist William Thomas Stead were duped into believing Julius and Agnes Zancig had genuine psychic powers, both claiming that the Zancigs used telepathy. In 1924 Julius and Agnes Zancig confessed that their mind reading act was a trick and published the secret code and all the details of the trick method they had used, under the title Our Secrets in a London newspaper. Doyle praised the psychic phenomena and spirit materializations produced by Eusapia Palladino and Mina Crandon, who were both exposed as frauds.

Doyle's two-volume book The History of Spiritualism was published in 1926. W. Leslie Curnow, a spiritualist, contributed much research to the book. In 1926, Robert John Tillyard wrote a predominantly supportive review of Doyle's book The History of Spiritualism in the journal Nature. This caused controversy, and several critics such as A. A. Campbell Swinton pointed to the evidence of fraud in mediumship and Doyle's non-scientific approach to the subject. In 1927, Doyle spoke in a filmed interview about Sherlock Holmes and spiritualism. Richard Milner, an American historian of science, has presented a case that Doyle may have been the perpetrator of the Piltdown Man hoax of 1912, creating the counterfeit hominidfossil that fooled the scientific world for over 40 years. Milner says that Doyle had a motive—namely, revenge on the scientific establishment for debunking one of his favourite psychics—and that The Lost World contains several encrypted clues regarding his involvement in the hoax. Samuel Rosenberg's 1974 book Naked is the Best Disguisepurports to explain how, throughout his writings, Doyle left open clues that related to hidden and suppressed aspects of his mentality.

Architecture

Doyle commissioned a newly-built home from Joseph Henry Ball, an architect friend, in 1895, and played an active part of the design process. He lived in Undershaw which is near Hindhead in Surrey from October 1897 to September 1907. It was a hotel and restaurant from 1924 until 2004, when it was bought by a developer and stood empty while conservationists and Doyle fans fought to preserve it. In 2012, the High Court in London ruled the redevelopment permission be quashed because proper procedure had not been followed, but it is now due to become part of the Stepping Stones school for children with disabilities and additional needs.

Doyle was staying at the Lyndhurst Grand Hotel during March 1912 and made his most ambitious foray into architecture: sketching the original designs for a third storey extension and altering the front facade to the building. Work began later that year and the building as it is today is a near perfect expression of Doyle's plans.