Strange ACD movie

I recently read something about ACD and Jean Leckie having an affair while his first wife Louisa aka Touie was alive. The affair has long been known, but ACD always claimed that he was celibate for the nine years it took Touie to die of tuberculosis. Just because the affair is emotional rather than physical is a mere technicality; ACD still went out in public with Jean and introduced her to family and certainly acted unfaithfully. Still, ACD's biographers went along with that claim of celibacy, and one book, Christopher Redmond's In Bed with Sherlock Holmes in 1984, even argued that ACD's feelings of sexual frustration and guilt showed up in his many Holmes stories focused on love triangles. It also argued that many characters, Holmes and Watson included, are projections of aspects of Doyle's personality.

So anyway, I read somewhere a post saying there was now recent proof that ACD and Jean Leckie were actually meeting in hotels with assistance from Doyle's mother, who fully approved of them together. So the whole celibacy thing was bullocks. I wanted to see the proof myself, so I did internet searches, and I found this article about Jean being a terrible stepmother according to an ACD biography by Russell Miller; I've never heard of him nor read that biography. I have read the 2008 biography by Andrew Lycett, though, but I think that one still claimed that ACD was celibate during those nine years.

=====

I also found a 2006 (or maybe 2005 according to IMDB) movie portraying ACD's life including this affair with Jean Leckie. It's called The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes & Arthur Conan Doyle, and I think it was a BBC TV movie. The movie is on Amazon Prime right now; it features Emily Blunt as Jean Leckie and Tim McInnerny as Selden. Unfortunately, Blunt's role has no character development, and she's mostly there to react to Doyle's pursuit of her; we never see any hint at her inner life and whether she feels guilty about carrying on with Doyle while Touie is dying. McInnerny has the juicier part because there's mystery and duality about it. I think if the movie had been expanded into a miniseries it would have worked better. As it is, they compress too many events, and Doyle just seems to go from one thing to another, as if wandering in a daze. He also looks fairly stupid and gullible when he goes to seances and flat out tells the medium who he wants to reach, instead of letting her discover it; she continues stringing him along with unsuccessful attempts to reach Doyle's dead father Charles, who was in an institution for years.

The movie starts with a happy 1892 Christmas marred by a nightmarish drawing sent to Doyle; he knows it's from his father Charles in the institution. ACD goes to visit but finds his father unresponsive, and he feels like something should be done for him. But his mother Mary Doyle is incensed with him, making him swear never to bring up the subject again. Then Doyle and his wife travel to Switzerland and visit Reichenbach Falls, where he gets the idea to kill off Holmes. Touie soon gets diagnosed with "consumption" and Doyle keeps imagining someone following him. After he kills off Holmes, he receives angry threats and becomes paranoid. The movie makes repeated use of the "Cardboard Box" story, showing severed ears everywhere.

ACD's literary agent Greenhough Smith suggests that he write an autobiography, and then this Selden guy shows up wanting go into his private history and his inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. The movie presents it as a deeply buried secret and a mystery to solve. Having read Lycett's biography that explores Bell, Waller, Budd, and other influences, there was no mystery to me, but the movie did propose some radical theories. It seems to say that Charles Doyle was an alcoholic and mentally ill, but that he wasn't really abusive or harming anyone; he was just a shameful secret that his wife Mary was covering up out of pride. To make money, Mary Doyle took in the lodger Dr. Bryan Waller, who usurped the role as head of the household, and the movie suggests that Bryan and Mary conspired to drug and institutionalize Charles Doyle so he would be out of the way. The movie suggests that ACD had been away at boarding school then came back to find his father already pushed out; and that he loved his mother so much, he was in denial about her deliberately getting rid of his father Charles. He naively didn't want to believe it was true and could not believe she was having an affair with Dr. Waller. Thus when he encounters a love triangle of his own, he decides his special "friendship" with Jean Leckie is all right as long as they don't have sex.

Also the movie reinterprets ACD's relationship to Joseph Bell, suggesting that the pocketwatch scene in The Sign of Four was based on ACD presenting his father's pocketwatch to Professor Bell in a public demonstration; in private afterward, ACD confronted Bell, who insisted that all his deductions came from the watch, not from researching ACD's life. (One wonders why ACD couldn't come up with that kind of skepticism about spiritualist mediums being scammy.) Selden suggests that when Bell made ACD his clerk in medical school, "now at last you had a proper father figure," and a hero he could admire. Selden suggests that ACD felt guilt about his father Charles dying and that he went to seances because he needed to apologize and get his father's forgiveness. The thing haunting ACD and shadowing him all these years is his own guilty heart (and also Holmes in a way). All these ideas are remarkable and interesting, yet the movie glosses over ACD's time spent in the Boer War and has him briefly reunite with Touie as if loving her again. Yet he continues on with Jean Leckie, so what really changed in him? The movie also makes effective use of the Hound of the Baskervilles scene, where Watson discovers Holmes in the hut on the moor. The movie pretends that this is Holmes's resurrection, when in fact Hound was set in the pre-Reichenbach days, and "Empty House" is the real resurrection. Touie dies offscreen and we don't even continue on to see ACD marry Jean Leckie, or see her become this terrible stepmother to his children. It's an interesting movie, if uneven.