The world's best-known detective Sherlock Holmes puts his unparalleled powers of deduction to work again
The world's best-known detective Sherlock Holmes puts his unparalleled powers of deduction to work again
'I have heard, Mr. Holmes, that you can see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart.'
Scandal, treachery and crime are rife in Old London Town. A king blackmailed by his mistress, dark dealings in Opium dens, stolen jewels, a missing bride - these are cases so fiendishly complex that only the great Sherlock Holmes would dare to investigate. For he, and he alone, has the extraordinary faculty of perception and almost unhuman energy which could solve them ...“He is unique in simultaneously bringing down the curtain on an era and raising one on another, ushering in a genre of writing that... has never been surpassed. His own life, as footballer... eye surgeon, champion of injustice and investigator into the paranormal, is the stuff of legend. Personally, I would walk a mile in tight boots to read his letters to the milkman”
Stephen Fry, The Arthur Conan Doyle Collection
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on May 22, 1859. He was a physician and writer, most noted for his Sherlock Holmes books, which are generally considered a major innovation in crime fiction. Conan Doyle had 2 children with his first wife, Louise Hawkins, who died in 1906. He went on to marry Jean Lackie, with whom he had 3 more children. He died of a heart attack in 1930. Visit the official web site of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate at
To Sherlock Holmes she is always THE woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer-excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained teasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
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