CONTINUED
Arthur Conan Doyle & The Tradition of the Lost & Found Manuscript
by Bob Coghill
The diary consisted of the musings of an archivist working at the university and while it was not literary in any sense, it does give an accurate sense of what he was thinking. His diary was one of several items left behind in the archive’s back room after he died. The current archivist felt that the materials, while not valid for accessioning, would be valuable for us, her students, to use as practical materials for accessing, processing and preserving.
I opened the diary at random somewhere near the middle. It was dated June 15. No year was noted.
My thoughts today are of an old gothic novel I read many years ago. In fact, it may have been the first one in the genre. I should have paid more attention in class. The author was Horace Walpole, and the story was The Castle of Otranto. I liked it a lot, especially the notion that it was a translation of a recently discovered manuscript. What a great idea. Walpole uses the finding of the manuscript as a way of making the story slightly removed from the storyteller, in effect saying, “I’m not making this up. These are just the facts, as I discovered them.” I tried to think of other authors who had done the same sort of thing. It is hard to remember all the stories I have read, let alone just those that used the same clever way of presenting a story this way—a kind of a disavowal of it being a story, but more just a sharing of some written material, that we have no reason to suspect. It wasn’t written as a story; just a way to accurately record an incident in a person’s life. One I do remember clearly is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Not only was that a great story, but the same idea of introducing it to the reader was used. Stoker wrote using words he found in journals, diaries and even clippings from newspapers. How clever was that!
Even my favourite author, the great storyteller Arthur Conan Doyle, introduces us to his wonderful adventures of Sherlock Holmes as “being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H Watson, MD, late of the Army Medical Department.” In my enthusiasms for all that Doyle wrote, I came across one of his horror stories, “The Terror of the Blue John Gap.” While I liked the story, it was the “found manuscript” part that reminded me of the great gothic stories I had read in my youth. Clearly Doyle liked using this tactic as a tool for making what would seem like an absolutely unbelievable story much more palatable by using someone else’s writing instead of his own. It worked so well in this story that I think I will use the technique when I write my own story.
Then he went on to write about other topics. I asked the archivist if I could go through the box in case I could find the story to which he was referring. And my luck ran out. The rest of the papers were just the mundane records of a life with no indication of any evidence of the story.
So, I will just write and apologize for not having time to come up with anything worthy of the project.
WHO IS BOB?
Bob Coghill is a retired teacher and librarian who lives in Vancouver, Canada. He is a member of the local Sherlock Holmes society, The Stormy Petrels of British Columbia, and a long-time member of the Bootmakers of Toronto. He was invested into The Baker Street Irregulars in 1983 and in 2010 received his second shilling. From 2005 – 2021 Bob served as an archivist for the Baker Street Irregulars Trust.