Arthur and Sherlock

November 28, 2016
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.

Starred review from November 1, 2016
Those were the footprints of a gigantic...forensic scientist!Like Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler, if for very different reasons, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) and his fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, have filled libraries with secondary works. Sims (The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond, 2014, etc.), a thoughtful literary biographer and sympathetic reader, adds a fine book to their number with this portrait of Doyle as a medical practitioner who wedded a talent for writing with the good fortune of having a useful model in the form of one of his professors. Joseph Bell, eccentric and inimitable, had an "oracular ability not only to diagnose illness but also to perceive details about patients' personal lives." Like Holmes, Bell could look at a frayed sleeve and divine how it got that way or could listen to a person speak and know within a couple of blocks where he or she hailed from and the circumstances of his or her life. But why a detective and not some version of a crusading coroner? Perhaps because such a figure didn't exist, and even the detective was a fairly new creation, a genealogy that Sims ably traces a few decades before Doyle's time to Edgar Allan Poe and his Dupin. Holmes is not just a Dupin, though; it took that leavening of Bell to lift Doyle from his mithridatic experiments with drugs and poisons to fame. Sims' story effectively retells the story of the young Doyle as something of a Holmes himself, someone who could persuade readers that "seeming clairvoyance beyond the limits of direct knowledge was possible in the real world." The author's deeply researched but reader-friendly take on Doyle and Holmes fits nicely along recent books by Michael Dirda and Barry Grant, and it stands, like Samuel Rosenberg's centrifugal book Naked Is the Best Disguise (1974), as a work of literature all its own. Even the most learned of Baker Street Irregulars will enjoy Sims' look at the making of Sherlock Holmes.

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December 15, 2016
Much of this valuable book rehashes material Holmesians know by heart, like Doyle's struggle to get published and the overwhelming influence of his teacher Dr. Joseph Bell. What's special is the magnifying lens the author uses to bring up interesting details, like image-conscious Doyle slipping out late at night to polish his brass nameplate, or Bell claiming a doctor could discern a woman's ailment by her posture and how she held her hands, or Samuel Johnson, a sort of ur-Holmes, observing in 1750 that it is easy to guess the trade of an artisan by his knees, his fingers or his shoulders. In the stunning middle chapters, Sims gathers the influences shaping Holmes. Not just the predictable ones, like Edgar Allan Poe and Emile Gaboriau, but also Dumas, Sir Walter Scott, Voltaire, and even the Bible (there's a locked-room mystery in the Book of Daniel). Obtuse remarks from Doyle himself (calling Holmes inhuman and Watson stupid ) prove D. H. Lawrence's advice to trust the tale, not the teller. Holmes devotees will find much of interest here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2017

As the creator of the most famous detective in English literature, Arthur Conan Doyle led an intriguing life himself. As a medical student at the University of Edinburgh, he found one of his professors, Joseph Bell, would note minute details of his patients and from those clues diagnose their illness. Thus was born the idea for Sherlock Holmes who possesses similar skills of observation. Sims (The Story of Charlotte's Web; Adam's Navel) blends biography and literary criticism to trace Doyle's life from his early days in poverty to his eventual success as a writer and charts the development of Holmes into the iconic detective readers know so well. Of particular interest are the accounts of Doyle's experiences in medical school that reveal the development of modern medicine. Doyle's adventures, or perhaps his bravado, such as purposely exposing himself to deadly diseases and testing combinations of chemicals by drinking them, make him sound almost like one of his fictional characters. VERDICT Sims makes this carefully researched book approachable as well as scholarly. Recommended for readers interested in Doyle and the genesis of the detective novel, as well as those seeking informative, entertaining reading.--Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo

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