Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930), celebrated author and literary agent for the tales of Sherlock Holmes and his biographer Dr. John H. Watson, has a complex relationship with the fabled City by the Bay, San Francisco, California.

In 1887, the first Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet, was released. This novella relates events that took place in 1881, including the legendary meeting of Holmes and Watson at the chemical laboratory of St. Bart’s. The second half of the story also contains a significant ‘flashback’ entitled ‘The Country of the Saints.’ This spans the space of five chapters and is set in the wild lands of the American West, specifically Utah. For reasons that will remain forever unclear, in 1889 or 1890, before the publication of any other Holmes tales, Conan Doyle made a curious choice to rewrite the American chapters of A Study in Scarlet, with the London action moving to San Francisco, as a play entitled Angels of Darkness. Holmes makes no appearance at all, and the John Watson, M.D. character contained within is almost indistinguishable from the Watson familiar to us from the subsequent tales of the Canon. First and foremost, in the play’s dramatis personae Watson is described as a ‘San Francisco Practitioner,’ suggesting that he is doing more than just visiting the City by the Bay, but has actually settled down there. His actions are also a bit out of form, and most shocking to many readers, he eventually marries a woman called ‘Lucy Ferrier’ (especially bizarre since A Study in Scarlet makes it clear that she died in 1860)! It is no surprise that this bizarre and apocryphal tale of Doyle’s, so at odds with the Watson that we know and love, remained unpublished for over a hundred years, until 2001, when The Baker Street Irregulars of New York decided that it should be allowed to see the light of day, if only for the sake of curiosity. Recent evidence (outlined in the Literary Agent’s Notes at the end of Watson’s recently unearthed pre-Holmes tale, The Isle of Devils) does shed some light on how and why Watson might have actually been induced to make a voyage to San Francisco c. 1884 (during the interval between the events set down in The Speckled Band – which take places in April 1883 – and The Beryl Coronet – proposed for 1886).

The next mention of San Francisco by Doyle takes place in The Noble Bachelor, published first in 1892 in the Strand Magazine, and then as part of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, with the events likely occurring in 1888. Therein the intriguingly named Lord Robert Walsingham de Vere St. Simon attempts to marry the fascinating Miss Hatty Doran, daughter of the California millionaire Mr. Aloysius Doran. Lord St. Simon had met the impetuous, volcanic lady while travelling in San Francisco the year earlier. As a denizen of this fair city, I am torn by what to make of the depiction of San Francisco as manifested by Hatty Doran’s character. While she has a “graceful figure and striking face” she was also a “tomboy, with a strong nature, wild and free, unfettered by any sort of traditions.” So far, so good. However, her manner of speech was fairly rough and colloquial, with at least three uses of the un-popular term ‘Frisco.  But in the end her behavior is gracious; perhaps more so than her jilted fiancée.

One possible explanation for these anomalies, is that Conan Doyle, editing Watson’s words, did not visit San Francisco for many more years. Finally, in 1923 (at the age of sixty-four) Conan Doyle arrived at San Francisco as part of his great lecture tour of North America. Sixteen years had passed since the Great Earthquake of 1906 had leveled much of the fair city that Watson once must have known. Where Conan Doyle stayed is a matter of great mystery. On the one hand, some historians suggest that he and his wife Jean took rooms at the Clift Hotel, the great art deco luxury hotel two blocks from Union Square (this choice might have made a practical sense, since it was advertised as the first hotel in San Francisco to be fire and earthquake proof). However, a contrary view is expressed by a beautifully polished brass plaque on the side of a gracious little gray-stone building (wedged between two massive apartment complexes) at 2151 Sacramento Street, across from Lafayette Park.

The house was reputedly built in 1881, and thus was a survivor of the Great Earthquake and subsequent Fire, which fortunately did not stretch quite this far west. Some evidence suggests that Conan Doyle simply visited the building, which belonged to one Dr. Adams. But the romantic likes to think that the unassuming Conan Doyle may have preferred this small building (with its echoes of a brownstone at 221 Baker Street) to the bustle of the massive Clift Hotel and, at the bidding of his host, transferred his effects there. In any case, we can hope that Conan Doyle finally appreciated the great city that he was visiting, though to our knowledge, the pen of his friend John H. Watson remained silent on the topic of a city filled perhaps with sad memories.