Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life (abridged)

Review: very engagingly read by Tim Pigott-Smith. Pearson was the archetype of the popular biographer - his subjects included Shaw, Shakespeare, Wilde, Disraeli and Tom Paine - and he had a talent for bringing them to life. But he always insisted on his right to tell the truth as he saw it, and this was the reason for the notorious falling-out with Adrian Conan Doyle, who first supported and then vilified Pearson’s life of his father. Listening to Mr Pigott-Smith’s mellow reading it’s easy to see why Adrian objected. His fanatical devotion would never have allowed him to accept Pearson’s portrait of Sir Arthur as a spiritually undeveloped and simple thinker. Personally I think Pearson strains too hard to present Conan Doyle as ‘the man in the street’, just as Adrian strained too hard to present him as a paragon of all the virtues, but when it comes to biography Pearson wins hands down. The reading is, as always with Naxos, enhanced by appropriate music, in this case from Dvorak, Grieg and Smetana..

Reviewed by: Roger Johnson, [District Messenger 215, 2001]