Arthur and Sherlock
Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
2018 Edgar Award Nominee
Shortlisted for the H. R. F. Keating Award from the International Crime Writers Association
From Michael Sims, the acclaimed author of The Story of Charlotte's Web, the rich, true tale tracing the young Arthur Conan Doyle's creation of Sherlock Holmes and the modern detective story.
As a young medical student, Arthur Conan Doyle studied in Edinburgh under the vigilant eye of a diagnostic genius, Dr. Joseph Bell. Doyle often observed Bell identifying a patient's occupation, hometown, and ailments from the smallest details of dress, gait, and speech. Although Doyle was training to be a surgeon, he was meanwhile cultivating essential knowledge that would feed his literary dreams and help him develop the most iconic detective in fiction.
Michael Sims traces the circuitous development of Conan Doyle as the father of the modern mystery, from his early days in Edinburgh surrounded by poverty and violence, through his escape to University (where he gained terrifying firsthand knowledge of poisons), leading to his own medical practice in 1882. Five hardworking years later--after Doyle's only modest success in both medicine and literature--Sherlock Holmes emerged in A Study in Scarlet. Sims deftly shows Holmes to be a product of Doyle's varied adventures in his personal and professional life, as well as built out of the traditions of Edgar Allan Poe, Émile Gaboriau, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens--not just a skillful translator of clues, but a veritable superhero of the mind in the tradition of Doyle's esteemed teacher.
Filled with details that will surprise even the most knowledgeable Sherlockian, Arthur and Sherlock is a literary genesis story for detective fans everywhere.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sims (The Story of Charlotte's Web) presents a concise and well-written account of the factors both internal and external that led to Arthur Conan Doyle's 1887 publication of "A Study in Scarlet," the first Sherlock Holmes story. Readers unfamiliar with the circumstances of Conan Doyle's early years and the influence of one of his medical school professors will be fascinated to learn how much Holmes was based on a real person. Sims lays out the ways in which Edinburgh's Dr. Joseph Bell used observation and deduction to diagnose patients after only a brief glance, in passages that read as if Dr. Watson was penning them. Sims, who is an expert on Victorian fiction, also presents historical antecedents for fictional detectives, as well as a cogent analysis of the ways in which Conan Doyle was, and was not, influenced by prior writers such as Edgar Allan Poe. He details how Conan Doyle struggled to get published before he hit gold with the creation of Holmes and Watson, who were at one point called Sherrington Hope and Ormond Sacker. Sims's skill and deftness with narrative biography will lead Sherlockians to hope that he continues the story of Conan Doyle's life in a future volume.
