Not everyone loves Sherlock Holmes. Raymond Chandler once wrote to his London publisher that he had “picked up a dime-store copy of ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles,’ and Lincoln was wrong — you can fool all of the people all of the time.” Chandler was in a clear minority — Holmes has proved to be one of the most vivid, popular, and imitated characters in all literature — but the man behind Holmes was equally unimpressed. “I am weary of his name,” wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1892. He saw the great detective as an embarrassing diversion from the “better things” he was intending to write.

This ambivalence should not surprise us, for Doyle was an emblematic split-level Victorian. On the one hand he was a dynamic pillar of the community who wrote 68 books, plays, pamphlets, and endless patriotic letters to the Times. But he was also a gullible and resolute spiritualist who could be fooled by fake fossils, psychic stunts, fairy sightings, and voices from beyond the grave.

Only a handful of authors can claim to have conjured a world-shaking figure — a Beowulf, a Dracula, a Frankenstein, or a Bond — and, thanks to Holmes, Doyle is one of them. The detective is a mazy invention: a gripping genre hero, yet a pioneer semiotician in the way he drew inferences from signs. Holmes may have been a restless Bohemian who made the careful sifting of scientific evidence seem a wild intuitive leap, but he had a delicious eye for detail (“It has long been a maxim of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important”). He was a beacon of reason at a time when the ugly shadows of industrial, urban progress (Ruskin’s famous “plague cloud”) were falling on the rural sanctities of yesteryear.

He stood tall for order and logic; the exacting deployment of scientific reason, he implied, could illuminate life’s dark corners better than all the religious myths and prejudices that blinded previous generations. “Any truth,” he declared, “is better than indefinite doubt.”

Yet alongside this confident materialism ran a taste for the occult. Doyle was a wide-eyed table-rapper, searching for messages from beyond the grave in Surrey’s finest dining rooms. Typically, he insisted that there was nothing fanciful about this; it was pure scientific exploration — a disinterested search for as-yet-unproven truths. He could not see that the Darwinian gusts sweeping away his religious faith had blown him into the kind of cul-de-sac for which Holmes reserved his haughtiest sneer.

He is, in short, a wonderful subject for a biographer, and, in “The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes” (Free Press, 557 pages, $30), Andrew Lycett has researched his career with industrious care. He has produced a reference book in narrative form. He proceeds, like all the best biographies (and so few novels these days), from cradle to grave. There’s the early life in Scotland, with the bookish mother reading French journals while stirring the porridge, and the alcoholic father. There are the Jesuitical boarding school days and the medical training in Edinburgh, where Doyle met the empirical method of diagnosis that would later inspire Holmes. There are the two marriages, the hearty family life, the literary success, and the shocking loss of his son Kingsley in the flu epidemic of 1919. It was after this dire blow that Doyle threw himself into the world of the paranormal. He contacted his son (delighted to hear that all was well over there) and was happy to accept gushing words of praise from Cecil Rhodes.

Mr. Lycett unrolls his material with a steady hand. There are plenty of treats, not least the ditty that appeared in Punch magazine when Holmes was rescued from the Swiss waterfall where he lay, presumed dead, for years.

They grappled on a cliff-top, on a ledge six inches wide
We deemed his chances flimsy when
he vanished o’er the side
But the very latest news is
That he merely got some bruises.
If there’s a man who’s hard to kill,
why he’s one.

The author of this nugget was a 21-year-old freelance writer called P. G. Wodehouse. And this is only one of many such finds. Mr. Lycett notes that Doyle was one of the first men to be issued with a speeding fine (and certainly the first to write a pompous retort about police persecution of motorists). On a speaking tour to Chicago, Doyle is introduced as “Canon Doyle” and replies that he is happy to be thought of as a “big gun.” The dismaying account of the feuds over Arthur’s papers that continue to scar the Doyle estate, meanwhile, is worth a small book in itself.

As the biography rattles on, however, the occasional clumsy sentence whines like a gnat in the dark. At one especially busy time in Doyle’s hectic life, Mr. Lycett contents himself with the somber observation: “Family responsibilities continued to occupy him.” One suspects comedy — this is what Mr. Pooter might have said of Hamlet. But Mr. Lycett is not joking. Slowly we notice that reading the book is like being in a railway compartment with the blinds down. You hear the announcements and tick off the stations, but somehow miss the rush and fun of the journey. The outward events of Doyle’s life are duly noted, but there is little resonant sense of Arthur as the vibrant central character in his own life story. Mr. Lycett excuses him when he behaves shabbily (in the affair he conducts while married to his mortally ill first wife) or idiotically (as in his credulous response to Piltdown Man or the Cottingley fairies). But we readers don’t want him defended: We want him unveiled.

The most suggestive absence, however, concerns sport. Mr. Lycett feels entitled to treat Doyle’s stick-and-ball enthusiasm as a semi-trivial hobby. He writes, of cricket, that it was his subject’s “preferred form of exercise” or the “usual outlet for his energies.” This misses the point. A man who plays 40 games in a season, some of them two-day affairs, is not merely killing time. Cricket, golf, boxing, skiing, fishing, riding … these pursuits were a serious daily preoccupation for Doyle, and one of the central planks of the manly Victorian Empire personality — clubbable, combative, chivalrous, sober, guarded with women who were not his mother — to which he conformed. To neglect this, perhaps out of belles-lettrist disdain, is to skip over something close to the essence of the man.

Nothing exposes this tendency more clearly than the book’s last line, which tells that the author has seen the “weathered card” of a golf game between Doyle and Kipling in Vermont, in 1894. What a magical document! Imagine the history of fin-de-siècle English literature that might lie in this scrap. We could glimpse the bunker with the twisted lip or brood on the curious incident of the frog in the sightline; we might wonder if Kipling could find his ball when all around him men were losing theirs… It is pregnant with fun, but Mr. Lycett seems reluctant to enjoy it.

The accumulation of such gaps leads to a portrait that is made of solid oak, but feels drained of sap. Doctor, writer, campaigner, lecturer, adulterer, rationalist, spiritualist, father, sportsman, clubman, political candidate, military planner, capitalist, freedom fighter, traveler, patriot, rebel … Doyle’s really was a wonderful life. Mr. Lycett’s, alas, has misplaced a good deal of the wonder, and settled for being merely full.

Mr. Winder, the author of four books, was literary editor of the Independent and deputy editor of Granta.