Arthur Conan Doyle, Creator of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, eventually studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, and built his writerly ambitions there. He published his first short story when he was only 20 and still deep in his medical training. He achieved his Doctor of Medicine in 1885 and continued professional studies as he continued to write and write and write. In 1886 he sold A Study in Scarlet, featuring a detective who was based on an instructor he had in medical school. It was published a year later, and the definition of what constituted a mystery in Western fiction began to be forever changed.
Within a few years of the debut of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle was ready to kill him off and move on to his many other projects, thus betraying a pattern of never quite understanding what was best for himself as a writer. Eventually, however, Holmes and Watson were featured in 56 short stories and 4 novels. The tension between rationality and suspense, between dissection and animation, was a powerful creative drive for Doyle. Sometimes he doesn’t seem to have understood it, and sometimes it is captured perfectly, flawlessly. It has been a gift to over a century of other writers, those who work within the canon’s inspiration and those who push back in various ways.
Doyle kept writing his science fiction and his beloved historical novels as he nailed down immortality with Sherlock Holmes. We carry what we can of what is in print. He is a good writer for that bridge age between YA and adult literature, by the way. And the comfort of his storytelling style, even when one thrills to the Hound of the Baskervilles all over again, makes him a writer for all ages and tastes and backgrounds. Enjoy!
Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell
Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell
June, 1916. With a world war raging on the continent, exhausted John H. Watson, M.D. is operating on the wounded full-time when his labors are interrupted by a knock on his door, revealing Sherlock Holmes, with a black eye, a missing tooth and a cracked rib. The story he has to tell will set in motion a series of world-changing events in the most consequential case of the detective's career.
Amid rebellion in Ireland and revolution in Russia, Germany has a secret plan to win the war and Sir William Melville of the British Secret Service dispatches the two aging friends to learn what the scheme is before it can be put into effect. In pursuit of a mysterious coded telegram sent from Berlin to an unknown recipient in Mexico, Holmes and Watson must cross the Atlantic, dodge German U-boats and assassination attempts, and evade the intrigues of young J. Edgar Hoover, while enlisting the help of a beautiful, eccentric Washington socialite as they seek to foil the schemes of Holmes's nemesis, the escaped German spymaster Von Bork.
Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell plunges Holmes into a world that eerily resembles our own, where entangling alliances, treaties, and human frailty threaten to create another cataclysm.