So wrote a Mr G. W. Parker of Sheffield in 1902. The letter was published in Good Words of December 1902, the winning entrant in their short-lived Letters to Living Authors competition whereby readers were solicited for their literary views. The runner-up, John O'Connor of Shepherd's Bush, similarly hoped that, after Sherlock Holmes's death in 1893, ‘admirers of your other fiction were pleased to think that you were free to devote yourself to more ambitious work’. History has left no other trace of these gentlemen's literary criticism but it spoke to a generally schismatic and confused sense of Conan Doyle's reputation in the early twentieth century. Good Words remarked upon this lack of unanimity: ‘very few [letters] are agreed as to which of his manifold classes of writing … most strictly entitles him to a place among the leading writers of to-day’. If this was true for readers, it was equally true of professional critics and even of Conan Doyle himself.

After the enormous success of The Hound of the Baskervilles, there seemed to be a sudden unease among critics at the prestige of ‘our only literary knight’ and a general desire that, for good or ill, he choose a path. In the Pall Mall Magazine, James Douglas was succinct on the subject of any author who ‘degrades his talent to supply the demand of the market’: ‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in Micah Clarke and The White Company, was travelling in the right direction, but the popularity of Sherlock Holmes tempted him, and he fell.’