I have written a well-received biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories. So, I am ideally placed to turn my attention from the real-life author to his gloriously rich fictional subject and blend their experiences of the late nineteenth-century world they both inhabited. This beautifully illustrated book brings Conan Doyle’s life and times into focus and shows how they influenced every aspect of his marvelous creation.
I wrote...
The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes: The Inspiration Behind the World's Greatest Detective
The novel that gets nearest to the essential nature of Arthur Conan Doyle; this is it. By the acclaimed author Julian Barnes, this book adopts a deceptively factual approach to the task of telling the story of how Conan Doyle sprang to the aid of George Edalji, the near-sighted son of an Indian-born vicar, who, in racially inspired attacks at the turn of the 20th century, had wrongly been accused of mutilating horses in the English Midlands village where he lived.
But beneath the biographical detail, a novelist is at work, teasing out correspondences between aspects of vision and the second sight Conan Doyle came to claim he had as a leading advocate of spiritualism. Barnes’s book is definitely the best novel about Conan Doyle, the man.
Now a major TV series starring Martin Clunes, Arsher Ali and Art Malik
From the winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011, an extraordinary true-life tale about a long-forgotten mystery...
Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great…
This is simply the finest short introduction to the life and works of Conan Doyle that you could hope for–written by a doyen of critics who once ran the Books pages of the Washington Post.
Dirda’s erudition and lightness of touch combine to make this a book that is succinct, illuminating, and always entertaining.
A passionate lifelong fan of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda is a member of The Baker Street Irregulars--the most famous and romantic of all Sherlockian groups. Combining memoir and appreciation, On Conan Doyle is a highly engaging personal introduction to Holmes's creator, as well as a rare insider's account of the curiously delightful activities and playful scholarship of The Baker Street Irregulars. On Conan Doyle is a much-needed celebration of Arthur Conan Doyle's genius for every kind of storytelling.
Insights into Conan Doyle's personal life were somewhat stalled in the early 21st century—until the publication of this illuminating biography, which incorporated new material relating to the short, sad life of the author’s first wife, Louise, and their two children.
Louise died of tuberculosis in 1906, allowing Doyle to marry the much younger Jean, who bore him three further children. This is a surprisingly moving tale.
Most readers will be familiar with the basic Sherlock Holmes stories. But they may not know Conan Doyle’s ‘non-canonical’ work. This is a strange didactic novel that the author wrote at the start of his career–before Holmes was even conceived.
It addresses some of his wider concerns–relating in particular to religion, medicine, empire and the workings of society. The novel had an interesting gestation as it was lost after Conan Doyle sent it to his publisher. He then tried to recreate it from his recollections of what he had originally written but did nothing with the revised manuscript until it was put up for auction 120 years later and subsequently published by the British Library in 2011.
The result is a revealing piece of Conan Doyle juvenilia.
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his first novel The Narrative of John Smith in 1883 when he was just 23, living in Portsmouth and struggling to establish himself as a doctor and a writer. Never published before, it has exceptional value as a window into the mind of the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and many of the themes and tropes of Conan Doyle's later writing can clearly be seen. Via the protagonist, John Smith, a 50-year-old man confined to his room by an attack of gout, Conan Doyle sets down his thoughts and opinions on a range of subjects – literature,…
This is a riveting overview of Conan Doyle's life and times. Strongly grounded in the man himself's writings, it deals comprehensively with various topics that occupied him throughout his life, including sport, medicine, science, law and order, army and empire, and spirit. It is full of scholarship and endless fascination.
From the early stories, to the great popular triumphs of the Sherlock Holmes tales and the Professor Challenger adventures, the ambitious historical fiction, the campaigns against injustice, and the Spiritualist writings of his later years, Conan Doyle produced a wealth of narratives. He had a worldwide reputation and was one of the most popular authors of the age.
A critical study of the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle and a cultural biography, this is a book for students of literary and cultural history, and Conan Doyle enthusiasts. It is a full account of all of his writing, and an investigation…
The great detective Sherlock Holmes did not spring from nowhere. His adventures were steeped in the late nineteenth-century world of his versatile and energetic creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. They reflected not only the domestic and global politics of those times but also the intellectual and scientific controversies.
Books on Holmes have tended to examine him through his stories. Lycett’s ground-breaking book shows him in his society and in his times. We see the influence of London and the English countryside on his stories. Other topics include the development of detective fiction and how his cult developed and is sustained—with particular reference to films.
