He has been called a genius and a fraud, a hero and an addict. He advised kings in their glittering palaces, then disappeared into the darkest alleys of London’s criminal underworld. He was (and remains) a global icon, but he could pass his most ardent fan on the street without a flicker of recognition. Who was this Sherlock Holmes? With an attention to detail that would make his subject envious, Nick Rennison gathers the clues of a life lived among the stars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Oscar Wilde to Sigmund Freud, and uncovers startling, previously unknown information. How did a Cambridge drop-out and bit player on the London stage transform himself into a renowned “consulting detective”? Did he know the identity of “Jack the Ripper”? When did Holmes and his nemesis Professor Moriarty first cross paths? To where did Sherlock Holmes disappear after his presumed “death” in 1891? Sherlock Holmes answers these questions and many more as it careens through the most infamous crimes and historic events of the era, all in pursuit of the real man behind the greatest detective in modern fiction—and, just perhaps, non-fiction.
Adult/High School—Rennison covers the "life" of fictional Sherlock Holmes in depth while providing entertaining reading for anyone who has met the detective in print or on screen. There have been numerous Holmes mysteries written by authors other than Conan Doyle over the years, some of which have added to what we "know" about Holmes. Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution (Norton, 1993), any of Laurie R. King's excellent series, or Michael Chabon's The Final Solution (HarperCollins, 2004) are a few of the good ones that preceded this clever extrapolation. Rather than presenting a Holmesian mystery, Rennison takes the history of a legendary man with extraordinary powers of deduction and attempts to demystify him. In presenting Holmes's life, he lays historical events side by side with Watson's related tales and shows how, by thinly veiling names and adjusting small facts, one can work out a real time line for Holmes's activities. This is a thoughtful and fun addition to the Sherlock Holmes canon, and a must for everyone who enjoys the greatest detective of all time.—Dana Cobern-Kullman, Luther Burbank Middle School, Burbank, CA
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Rennison creates an in-depth biography of the world's most famous detective that will intrigue Sherlockians and non-Sherlockians alike. Effortlessly melding genuine Victorian history with episodes from Doyle's original stories, the author adopts the popular conceit that Holmes and Watson actually existed, and uses the few clues from the canon to reconstruct the sleuth's ancestry and upbringing. While some of his conclusions will engender controversy among buffs (such as his assessment that Holmes and his brother, Mycroft, set up Professor Moriarty for the fatal encounter at Reichenbach), Rennison makes a logical case for his assertions. He falls a little short in explaining Holmes's devotion of time and resources to espionage rather than deduction, but overall his attempt ranks with previous similar speculations by Michael Harrison and William S. Baring-Gould. (Nov.)
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