Arthur Conan Doyle wrote Sherlock Holmes so successfully that thousands of people have written to the offices at 221B Baker Street, asking for help from what they thought was a real, live consulting detective. When Conan Doyle was serving in World War I, he was astonished when a high-ranking officer asked him in what regiment Holmes was serving. Bewildered, Conan Doyle replied that Holmes was too old for active duty, an answer which fortunately satisfied without being an outright lie. Sherlock Holmes is very real to millions of readers, thousands who belong to societies and clubs devoted to the detective, and so in his Unauthorized Biography, author Nick Rennison gives us what we want and pretends a life history of the infamous Holmes, using the canon of original stories and novels and historical events from the times to make it all the more realistic and engaging. Using Conan Doyle’s stories as a guide, Rennison picks out the names, places, and events that Watson drops and lays them side by side with real historical names, places, events to create a timeline for the great detective, complete with a lonely childhood, his much-debated “missing years” in Tibet and Persia, and friendships with Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde, and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle. We see Sherlock Holmes as a bit player on the London stage. We are with Sherlock when he first meets Watson and when he first tastes cocaine. We see deeper into his relationships with brother Mycroft and rival Moriarty. Firmly based in historical research yet with a bit of a tongue-in-cheek tone, Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography is the rousing history of the greatest detective who never lived.

posted Feb 5, 2010 at 12:22AM

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