The Curious Case of Roger Straughan and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A review of Roger Straughan, A Study in Survival: Conan Doyle Solves the Final Problem, O-Books, Winchester & Washington, 2009

In some rare video footage of an interview with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle filmed in the summer of 1927, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle walks into shot at the beginning of the take with a dog at his side, and calls the dog to follow him at the end. During the interview, in which he talks about the character of Sherlock Holmes and, closer to Conan Doyle’s heart, his interest in spiritualism. For Conan Doyle spiritualism is a  ‘great philosophy’ and a subject on which he describes himself as a ‘gramophone’ rather than an expert as such. Conan Doyle justifies spending so much of his time and energy, as well as financial resources, writing and lecturing on spiritualism because of its importance for the human race. He wanted to give others the knowledge and assurance he had himself received that we survive death. Conan Doyle died some three years later in July 1930, but as might be expected from a President of the College of Psychic Studies with an interest in psychic matters stretching over 40 years, Conan Doyle’s desire to prove that ‘there is no death’ did not end with his passing from his physical body. Communications purporting to be from Arthur Conan Doyle (ACD) through various mediums started almost immediately, of which his widow judged some ten percent likely to be genuine due to the quality of evidential communication they possessed. Attempts at communication from ACD have apparently continued to the present day, notably through the physical trance mediumship of David Thompson, examples of which can be heard on Victor Zammit’s Afterlife Report website.

          The 1927 film footage of ACD with his dog is significant to our case, a study of Conan Doyle’s survival, as dogs provided one of the first clues ACD sent to Roger Straughan, academic philosopher and Conan Doyle enthusiast. The Straughan’s much loved but psychotic rescue dog Sgott, a German shepherd/collie cross, had died from a malignant sarcoma. In the interval between death and burial, Roger Straughan reached for some bedtime reading, a volume of collected Conan Doyle short stories. Opening the book at random he alighted on the words ‘his exit was as speedy and painless as could be desired’ (17), which it turned out referred to the death of a dog. On the previous page his eye was drawn to the sentence, ‘A more malignant case I have never seen’, the case being ‘a frightful sarcoma’, and on the opposite page ‘an exceedingly lucky dog’ (18), a phrase often used to describe Sgott, whose anti-social habits would not have been borne by many.
        Written in the form of a detective story, searching for clues and weighing the evidence, Straughan embarks on a journey lasting over a decade in which ACD appears to communicate to him via his literary works. We learn that for Conan Doyle books were not just stories but a way of communicating with the spirit of the deceased, and that contrary to an ‘expert’ who pronounced that ACD hated dogs, he was in fact exceedingly fond of them, that they were even used as a kind of signature of friendship. Using this method of allowing his hand to be drawn randomly to a book, page and sentence, Straughan was even given the target word Conan Doyle had agreed with his last surviving daughter, Dame Jean, before his death (a ring). Apparently many psychics and mediums had approached Dame Jean with messages said to be from her father over the years, but none had hitherto managed to identify their pre-arranged signal.

         As an academically trained philosopher, albeit one with an interest in psychical research, Straughan continued to look for proof, or at least greater certainly, that he was not deluding himself. Rather crucial to this method of communication is the number of misses, as enough questions and random searches might be expected to throw up occasional hits. Like many others I have attempted the book method of divination myself, usually with a bible or collected works of Shakespeare, volumes that might be expected to have the range of vocabulary and reference that would enable a meaningful answer to most questions to be found. In my own case, despite the occasional memorable phrase that seemed to exactly fit the question I had mentally posed, most readings are well wide of the mark, leading me to conclude that the hits are more likely to be coincidence than any form of intelligent communication (I never really asked with what, the choices being my own subconscious or some unidentified external force). Straughan raises the question of hits, and with a success rate of fifty percent or higher, many of which were strikingly apt, he comes eventually to the conclusion that there is an intelligent force at work behind his readings. The question is then is whether this intelligent force could conceivably be ACD himself. One way Straughan sought to approach this question was to look carefully at answers communications in areas in which ACD was known to be particularly interested, which were many as Conan Doyle was a man of considerable breadth. The subjects covered include medicine (ACD was trained as a medical doctor), sport, current affairs and politics, spirituality and religion. We are given many examples of the questions put by Straughan on weighty and trivial matters, and the answers delivered by way of random readings from ACD’s corpus of works.

          A legitimate question the reader might have is ‘so what’? While the book makes an excellent read, well written and intriguing, Straughan himself raises the issue of triviality – a stumbling block for many when assessing the validity and veracity of supposed psychic communications. The answer is that it is precisely the personal, supposedly trivial personal details that are most likely to prove to the receiver the veracity of the communication. More profound spiritual messages or accounts of post-mortem existence are hard or impossible to verify. For ACD the desire to prove his survival was and, we are asked to believe, is of itself of profound importance. Sympathy for a dead dog was precisely the sort of information most likely to catch Straughan’s attention.

The book begins and ends with an account of a rare volume of communications supposedly from beyond the grave through the mediumship of Grace Cooke, under the title Thy Kingdom Come…’. A friend of Straughan’s had located and borrowed the book from a library on his behalf. He was reading it on the 5.35 intercity express from Paddington Station one evening when the train struck a car at a crossing  and derailed. A reversal in the usual order of carriages meant that Straughan was not in his usual position, and escaped with minor injuries, while many others in the centre of the train where he normally sat were not so fortunate. The book was lost, but eventually returned to Straughan, also unharmed, and he wondered whether ACD had a hand in his survival, and if so for what purpose? The tentative answer was in order to write this book, to add another piece of the jigsaw in the emerging picture of the survival of consciousness.

In one of the more amusing and perhaps apposite communications from ACD, Straughan explaines that the book he had been planning to write was a much more ambitious work on the evidence for survival covering a wide range of psychic phenomena. His lingering doubts as to his capacity to complete such a project held him back from sending the book proposal to a publisher. Turning to ACD for advice he alighted on a conversation between an elderly scholar and his son, in which the father ‘had obviously been setting his literary aspirations far too high: ‘“I have set myself a task”, explains the father, “This is nothing less than to publish an English translation of the Buddhist Djarmas. With diligence it is possible that I might be able myself to complete the preface before I die” ‘ (pp.153-4). On the less ambitious and more reasonable project of writing an account of this unusual form of literary mediumship, ACD’s comment was ‘I’ll do the writing’ (p.155), so that settles that then.