David Pirie, the writer
A slightly battered early edition of Sherlock Holmes stories was the inspiration for a life-long fascination with the detective, and the whole story behind him, for writer David Pirie.
He first came across the stories as an eight-year-old in St Andrews and went onto devour the novels under the bed sheets.
A decade or so later, when studying under renowned university lecturer Leavis, Pirie heard these novels decried as "not serious works". He determined to prove otherwise.
Since then he has kept returning to them, trying to find the real essential story behind the detective yarns.
He enjoyed acclaim and success five years ago with the BBC television series The Murder Rooms featuring Ian Richardson playing Dr Joseph Bell, author Arthur Conan Doyle's acknowledged mentor.
However his quest, to find out what led Conan Doyle to create such a character as Sherlock Holmes, intricately complicated but also very believably human, wasn't sated.
Now with the new feature length drama The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes & Arthur Conan Doyle, David at least feels he has got to grips with the inner dimension of the author and his creation.
Says David: "I've just always wanted to know what led him to create Holmes, a character of great depth and complexity.
"People say he is calculating but he is also very emotional. He seems real and many people across the world have thought he was real and existed.
"But he was a character, the author Arthur Conan Doyle is the real person at the heart of it all. Biographers have charted his life, but somehow that essential something – the story behind the story – didn't quite seem to emerge.
"On the face of it, Arthur Conan Doyle – author and adventurer – is known but it his public face that people see and yet he too was a very emotional man, driven in ways that have never been clearly explored before.
"As Dr Thomas Walmsley, a psychiatrist with a particular interest in the psychology of public people, observed: 'For reasons that have yet to be fully explored, there seems to have been a greater tension between the public and the private in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle than in any other public figure I have ever studied with one possible exception, the former US President Richard Nixon'."
Set between 1892 – when Doyle was 33 - and the earliest days of the new century, The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes & Arthur Conan Doyle is a fictional exploration of the dark family secrets which drove the author to create the world famous detective.
Although fictional, it is largely rooted in fact focussing on a time in his life when Doyle – played by Douglas Henshall - should have had the world at his feet, feted as the most famous author on earth, but was wrestling with various different personal demons.
At the core of it all is the tragic death of his father in an asylum, in the wake of which Doyle's life entered turbulent and emotional waters as he mysteriously and controversially killed off Sherlock Holmes, provoking widespread condemnation, banner headlines and hatemail.
He was also tending to his wife Louise (Saskia Reeves), seriously ill with tuberculosis, while at the same time falling in love with another woman Jean Leckie (Emily Blunt).
These are the undisputed facts but the drama features a biographer Selden (played by Tim McInnerny), who begins to work on an account of the author's life - a painstaking probe into Doyle's past which slowly turns into a psychological battle about the truth behind the author’s struggle with his creation.
Says David: "I didn't just want to do a drama documentary. I wanted to really get under the skin of Arthur Conan Doyle.
"The facts exist and virtually every conversation in the piece is based on correspondence and records which exist, but I wanted to get beyond the facts, beyond what was said, beyond what can be documented.
"Arthur Conan Doyle was a very passionate man and I wanted to get to the heart of that passion, to understand the artist in him."
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