The Coming of the Fairies

"Written in 1922 by the creator of the super-logical character Sherlock Holmes , this to me is a perfect example of very bad thinking. Conan Doyle lost his son Kingsley after Kingsley returned, badly injured, from World War I. And Conan Doyle spent the rest of his life looking for some form of communication from him. He thought that he had found it through several spirit mediums, who fooled him. He was very easily fooled. He was even fooled by a couple of teenage girls who invented the story of the Cottingley fairies in 1917. I myself exchanged a long correspondence with Elsie Wright, who was the main instigator of that hoax. She never quite cracked to me – that is, she never said in so many words that it was a fake. But she did say that I was taking away the fun for people. I don’t think so. I’m just informing them. I think it was a delicious hoax. The Coming of the Fairies is so naïve, so accepting, [it is] so shameful that Arthur Conan Doyle could have come out with it. He got stories from people from all over the world that went into the book. And there was just one case that he doubted, from a lady who said she saw in the forest a little carriage pulled by tiny horses with fairies sitting in the back of the carriage. He was aghast at that. He thought tiny horses were ridiculous. He could accept fairies with wings on their backs, but not tiny horses. So there was a limit to his acceptance, but my goodness it was far out there. Many people have commented how amazing it is that Sherlock Holmes, the most logical fictional character ever created by a writer, was created by Arthur Conan Doyle. But I think they’re very wrong in that observation. Sherlock Holmes could not function as a human being the way that Conan Doyle had him function. In one story, Sherlock enters a deserted building, finds some cigar ash on the floor, and deduces from this cigar ash a huge amount that would have been impossible to deduce that way. He didn’t make allowance for the fact that maybe some hobo out on the street had picked up a cigar butt, lit it and went inside this building to smoke it. No no, there had to have been someone extremely wealthy in this building, because this was a very expensive cigar, and the ship only came in at a certain hour of the day on a certain month, and so on – the most convoluted reasoning, to no avail whatsoever. There are many other examples that show how Sherlock Holmes could not have existed in a real world. Don’t go any further. He was not friends with Harry Houdini. Harry Houdini liked everyone to believe he was a friend of Conan Doyle’s and vice versa. The two of them bore with one another because they were feeding off each other’s notoriety and fame. Eventually, the friendship – such as it was – broke off completely. I have with me a number of original letters that Conan Doyle wrote to friends, really bombing on Harry Houdini. One of these days I hope to get around to publishing these letters in a book. And in my next book, A Magician in the Laboratory , which will be coming out anon, there is a big discussion of the apparent friendship between Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, which was more of a publicity stunt than anything else. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, I have. That’s pretty lame thinking, I would say. If people only have that for a solution, then they know nothing of the conjuring art whatsoever. My colleagues in the Magic Circle in London and I often get together and laugh about it – although it’s a rather sad situation if people believe that what we do on stage has to be paranormal. David Copperfield himself told me of a stunt where he would call up a person from the audience at random and tell them their telephone number. It’s a standard trick, but people were still insistent that it had to be genuine, because there is no possible way to do that. Of course there is! It’s known as mentalism. But so many lay persons out there, and even scientists as well, think that they know better about some of these things. If scientists think that a piece of paper with “PhD” on it makes them absolutely infallible, they’ve made a big mistake. This interview was published September 28th, 2011"