Conan Doyle: The man who created Sherlock Holmes - Andrew Lycett (First UK edition)

It is one of the most intriguing dichotomies in literature. On the one hand you have fiction’s most enduring character, Sherlock Holmes, the epitome of cold calculation and reason. On the other is his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a bundle of contradictions, who was a lifelong follower of spiritualism (to the extent he was convinced that photographs of the Cottingley Fairies were real).

The complexities started early. Born in Scotland to an artistic Irish family, Conan Doyle became the archetypal Englishman and advocate of the British empire. With an alcoholic father and dominating mother, he rejected his family’s Roman Catholicism. Seeking salvation in the scientific certainties of medicine, he became a doctor. But this proved inadequate: he needed scope for his imagination in writing, and for his repressed religious feelings in spiritualism.

The result was a fascinating personality and strong individualist, someone who, despite the trappings of convention, was prepared to take on the establishment in innumerable struggles for justice.

Never content with Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle was also a prolific writer of horror stories, histories and poetry. He was a sportsman, politician, clubman, polemicist, and much more besides.

While he sought to square his divergent philosophical attitudes, he was torn between dutiful devotion to his tubercular wife and passion for his beautiful young mistress.

With access to vast amounts of previously hidden archival material, Andrew Lycett shows the agonies, struggles and humanity of this great author as never before. Sir Arthur’s literary career is played out in the middle of intense personal drama. With Lycett’s mastery of the historical background, Conan Doyle’s life becomes a symbol of Victorianism battling to make its accommodation with the modern world. It makes for scintillating biography of the highest quality.