On the corner of Pultney and Rundle Streets, Adelaide city, right outside Hungry Jacks, there is a small plaque for Arthur Conan Doyle. I can’t remember what it commemorates: did he stop there on his tour of Australia, when he was promoting “spiritism” (séances, contact with the dead etc.)? Or did Holmes have a connection to the city? I forget.

I have just been reading a fictional account of Doyle – and a different partner of his, George – in Julian Barnes’ “Arthur and George”. It’s a delight to learn more about Doyle as a character, and the first two-thirds of the book make for a gripping read. (It is based on a real life crime he himself investigated.) The writing is pleasingly accurate: words are always precise and apt, exactly capturing character, and from that, worlds. (The description of George’s obsession with trains and stations and station masters and tickets, and the implicit understandings – contracts – that are created between the railways and a person who purchases a ticket and becomes a passenger – this is excellent. And neatly used to explain the way George understands England, and the role of a citizen within it.)

Yet I felt the last third of the book was a bit of a let down. The narrative seems to move a bit more from character to character – but unnecessarily: we get many different points of view but they don’t all add to the tale. George’s presence at the end – at an event he would seem unlikely to attend, with his book and binoculars – wasn’t convincing. The “spiritism” in this later section also jarred. It is something for Doyle’s story, but not fitting for this tale of Arthur and George. The scene with George in front of Prince Albert’s statue seemed pushed, as if Barnes wanted an epiphanic moment before the book’s end. It didn’t work, from what you knew of George, and in the writing itself there was something lacking – a poetics was missing. (And I still don’t understand what an “unofficial Englishman” is.)

(Btw – reading a hardback edition from Jonathon Cape, London 2005 – there were numerous proofing errors; haven’t seen such a carelessly printed book from a big publisher in a long time.)

But if in the end Doyle himself is not always so interesting, it does make you want to go back to Sherlock and Watson and life and olden times.