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The first 200 pages are a facsimile of Doyle’s personal diary, complete with rather crude drawings, doodles, smudges and lists of animals slaughtered during the expedition. One thing is immediately apparent. Doyle had very neat handwriting, particularly for a doctor. The facsimile is followed by an annotated transcript with a couple of essays and short stories (including ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’) to complete what is undoubtedly a handsome package.
But what’s the point? It’s painfully obvious that the diary was written for Doyle’s personal reference and because of this I’m afraid many of the entries are very dull indeed. Take Thursday, 4 March:
Gave out tobacco in the morning. Slept forenoon. Went ashore in the evening. Went with second mate and Stewart to the Queen’s and had something short as he calls it. Then went to Mrs Brown’s.
Lellenberg and Stashower append no fewer than four footnotes, about 300 words, to this entry — none of them uninteresting in themselves but still uncomfortably Pooterish.
Compare this with one of the letters Doyle wrote to his mother, also in the book:
We went to bed with a great stretch of water before us as far as the eye could reach, & when we got on deck in the morning there was the whole sea full of great flat lumps of ice, white above and bluish green below, all tossing and heaving on the waves.
This is still not great writing but at least it has a certain energy and excitement. Why? Because it’s actually written for an audience, albeit an audience of one. If Doyle had been thinking of his future readers on Wednesday, 28 July, he would have done better than ‘Another disagreeable day.’
I’m not sure that this entire interlude, the 19th-century equivalent of a gap year, really had any bearing on Doyle’s future writing. ‘Black Peter’ is the only story that references it, and even that does so rather lazily. Look at Holmes’s summing up:
The amazing strength, the skill in the use of the harpoon, the rum and water, the sealskin tobacco-pouch — all these pointed to a seaman, and one who had been a whaler.
Did Doyle need to travel to the Arctic to learn that?
All of which said, Dangerous Work will make an excellent gift for anyone who needs to know that Doyle kept a blabbernose seal’s bone in his consulting room or that plum duff is the last thing that
anyone with intussusception should eat. And I really don’t mean to sneer. The book is a labour of love and I feel quite sad. Perhaps if I loved Doyle just a bit more, I might have found it less of a labour.
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