Arthur Conan Doyle: The Case of the Sherlock Holmes Author-Turned-Spy

Britain’s consulting detective remains an enduring enigma but perhaps the most complex riddle of all the Sherlockian mysteries is whether Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was working as a secret agent for the British government and using Holmes as a propaganda tool.

As Sherlock might say: Don’t just see, observe. Can you deduce a conclusion based on these facts?

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Arthur Conan Doyle & the Adventures of the War Propaganda Bureau 

Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1859 and perfected his German while studying in Austria. After graduating from medical school in Edinburgh and Vienna, he carved out a sideline writing crime fiction. He earned $25 for the rights to A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first of 60 Holmes stories and novels featuring a consulting detective modeled after Doyle’s professor Dr. Joseph Bell.

Determined to support the British Army at the turn of the century, Doyle volunteered to work as a doctor on the frontline of South Africa’s Boer War for several months and wrote two short works justifying Britain’s role in the fighting. His efforts led to an invitation to dine with King Edward VII and a knighthood in 1902.

As the winds of WWI reached British shores in 1914, the UK government established its War Propaganda Bureau. One of its jobs was to strike deals with publishing houses to sell propaganda written by famous authors rather than distribute the material for free, the University of Oxford says. The Bureau also approached authors directly, hoping to harness the mighty pen to promote the Empire’s cause.

In July 1914, at the start of WWI, The Strand magazine published Doyle’s Danger!, a story that predicted Britain would be starved into submission by eight enemy submarines. “The underwater menace came from the fictional country of Norland but was a thinly veiled reference to Germany's naval power,” the BBC reported. “The text was designed to shock and alarm readers, and force them to demand action from their leaders.”

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Doyle & the Authors’ Manifesto

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In his autobiography, Doyle refers to another of his publications - a September, 1914 recruiting pamphlet To Arms! - as ‘literary propaganda’.

That same month Doyle, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and other literary legends signed an Authors’ Declaration, a manifesto declaring Germany’s invasion of Belgium was a crime and that Britain “could not without dishonor have refused to take part in the present war”.

It wouldn’t be the last time Doyle would bolster the British government’s position during the war. Was he simply a patriot or was something more spooky afoot? 

Doyle boasts endlessly about his intelligence contacts in his autobiography Memoirs and Adventures. When Doyle isn’t golfing with the British head of intelligence in Egypt, he's dining with Britain's Brig.-General John Charteris, WWI chief of intelligence at the British Expeditionary Force. Doyle’s tour of the war’s frontlines in 1916 is arranged by Thomas Wodehouse Legh, Britain’s paymaster-general who is also in charge of foreign propaganda. The Foreign Office stepped in with a £1,000 donation to help Doyle publish his 1902 Boer War pamphlet - completed with editorial assistance compliments of Britain’s ‘Intelligence Department’.

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Sherlock Holmes: The Curious Case of the Spy in the English countryside‍

Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes also had multiple dealings with British intelligence - retrieving top-secret documents in The Naval Treaty (1893), for example, and working directly for the British prime minister. In His Last Bow, Holmes is an undercover operative in an espionage operation involving a German spy.

There are no mysteries to solve in His Last Bow (1917). No elementary deductions. The narration is in the third person rather than told by Dr. John Watson. Why the sudden change after Doyle had used the same formula for 30 years? Some readers believe Doyle wrote the story as another propaganda tool to boost morale as WWI dragged into its third devastating year. “There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet,” Holmes tells Watson. “It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind nonetheless, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”
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Sherlock Holmes: The Return of the Propaganda Detective
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During WWII, Universal brought Holmes to the big screen in three movies, positioning Sherlock (Basil Rathbone) as a counterintelligence expert who foils Nazi plots. The films are notable for reinforcing three key propaganda messages: Britain was engaged in a 'people's war'; citizens should be wary of Nazi agents and fifth columnists, and; America and Britain would succeed because they had strong ties based on mutual respect and a shared culture.

Never mind that Doyle had already died of a heart attack in 1930. Sherlock Holmes lived on to fight the Nazis from his new home in Hollywood.

There is no disputing that Sherlock Holmes had transformed into a British government spy by the 1917 publication of His Last Bow. The mystery is whether Sherlock’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, did also.

As Holmes might deduce: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

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