Where is Sherlock Holmes when you need him?
In 1884, three years before Holmes would make his debut, his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle finished his very first novel. When he wasn’t treating patients, the British physician was experimenting with writing short stories. But his dream was to make a name for himself in the literary world and short-form writing wasn’t cutting it.
The Narrative of John Smith was Doyle’s first attempt at penning a longer tale and, at least according to the man himself, it was good. “Of course it was the best thing I ever wrote,” he later proclaimed. He hoped the literary establishment would agree. In the time-honored tradition of aspiring writers the world over, he packaged the sole copy of his manuscript up and shipped it off to a potential publisher.
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But the manuscript never arrived.
Doyle’s entreaties to the British mail system were unsuccessful and he resigned himself to the hard truth: his very first novel had been lost for good. While he later attempted to rewrite the book from memory—the fragmented result of which was published in 2011 after being discovered among his papers—the original, full-length version of The Narrative of John Smith has never been found.
Long before Doyle became a best-selling author, a literary and political diplomat, and a knight of Great Britain, among his long list of other adventures and accomplishments, he was a struggling new physician trying to balance his day job with his creative passion and his obligations to the tax man.
In 1883 around the age of 23, Doyle was settling into his new home in Southsea and trying to get his medical practice off the ground. Lucky breaks—quite literally—were all that was keeping him afloat. “Just a line to say that we have had another lucky hit—A man broke his jaw & fractured his skull just outside the house today in a carriage accident…and I had to take him home and received 2 guineas for my trouble,” he wrote to his mother, his primary life-long correspondent, in February of that year.
When he wasn’t fixing up unfortunate souls to keep the money rolling in, Doyle was starting work on what he hoped would be his first literary masterpiece.
As a young man, Doyle fancied himself something of an enlightened bohemian and he used these progressive views as the intellectual basis for his inaugural novel.
He centered his story around a 50-year-old invalid confined to his bed after suffering from a bad bout of gout. More of a rambling philosophical essay than a plot-driven tale, The Narrative of John Smith explores the issues and ideas of the day that the suffering protagonist debates with his fellow residents.
Rachel Foss, head of contemporary archives and manuscripts at the British Library, told the Guardian in 2011 that the book, or at least Doyle’s recreation of it, is “fairly loose in terms of plot and character.” Famed Brit Stephen Fry called it an example of Doyle’s "boundless energy, enthusiasm and wide-ranging mind, not to mention [his] pitch-perfect, muscular and memorable prose.”
"The breadth, depth and scope of Conan Doyle's knowledge and curiosity is often overlooked,” Fry said. “He was the first popular writer to tell the wider reading public about narcotics, the Ku Klux Klan, the mafia, the Mormons, American crime gangs, corrupt union bosses and much else besides.”
There is no doubt that the discovery of the six rewritten chapters—all that was found and perhaps all that Doyle completed—was a boon to scholars who have noted that there are echoes of this early work in some of the characters who would populate the Holmes universe. There is also general agreement that this long piece of fiction is more of a precursor to the modern think piece than a fully realized novel.
But some are more critical of Doyle’s first attempt at a book than others.
Doyle biographer Andrew Lycett writes that “under the figleaf of fiction, it was little more than a palimpsest for interesting ideas.” Or, to put it more bluntly, “Everyone involved seems to be a vehicle for Arthur's current obsessions.”
British novelist Anthony Horowitz deemed the newly published discovery “a piece of Doyle juvenalia… rambling and incoherent, I thought it offered little insight into the genesis of a great literary mind.”
However 21st century critics and scholars may rule on the merits of The Narrative of John Smith, the big question at the heart of the Mystery of the First Novel is what Doyle really thought of it… and what really happened.
As far as the accepted evidence is concerned, the British postal service was fully to blame.
“The publishers never received it. The Post Office sent countless blue forms to say that they knew nothing about it, and from that day to this, no word has ever been heard of it,” Doyle wrote in an article titled “My First Book” for The Idler magazine in 1893.
And then he continued: “Of course it was the best thing I ever wrote. Who ever lost a manuscript that wasn’t? But I must in all honesty confess that my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again—in print.”
It is only a whiff of self-criticism, but one that still begs the questions: was it just the wisdom of hindsight in which the then-bestselling author of the Sherlock Holmes series was judging his first work, or was he concerned about its worth in the days after it was completed?
Lycett for his part questions the accepted story around the manuscript’s disappearance. In 1885, Doyle married his first wife Louisa Hawkins. Soon after, the then-physician wrote in another letter that he was abandoning his short story attempts to write novels as “after my marriage... my brain seems to have quickened and both my imagination and my range of expression were greatly improved.”
But this bit of amnesia overlooks the fact that he had already written a novel two years prior, the one that had been lost in the mail. Lycett suggests that maybe Doyle decided to blame his woes on the post office—the 19th-century version of the computer crash—while he engaged in a bit of self-censorship or “quietly secreted it, ever pretending to have lost it.”
This theory overlooks the fact that Doyle did, in fact, make an attempt to re-write the lost book, something he might not have done had he considered it an intellectual failure. But these theories will remain just that. Over 130 years after the events in question occurred, even Holmes would not be able to determine the true fate of the first manuscript.
In fact, it was only a lucky break that led scholars to uncover the bits of The Narrative of John Smith that exist today.
Following Doyle’s death, his estate was caught for decades in the middle of a familial war. It was only in in the early aughts that several boxes of his papers finally made their way to the British Library. When scholars began sifting through their contents, they were surprised to discover Doyle’s six-chapter rewrite of the novel that had been considered lost forever.
And so, in 2011, the circle of a literary career was complete. The very first novel of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the very last to be published, an event he no doubt viewed from the grave in horror.
