Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters.

Doyle, Arthur Conan (author) and Jon Lellenberg (author) and others.

Best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle was a man of many talents. Besides being a celebrated author, he was a physician, a sportsman, an advocate for criminal and social justice, a war correspondent, a military historian, and, late in life, a spokesman and activist for a new religion, spiritualism. All those aspects of him are reflected by this massive and annotated collection of previously unpublished letters written from the 1860s, when he was a schoolboy, to the year of his death, 1930. Many were written to his mother, Mary Foley Doyle, to whom he was especially close. The letters trace his development as a writer (“Sherlock Holmes seems to have caught on,” he writes his mother) but also deal with subjects including Britain’s role in the controversial war in South Africa, domestic politics, the perennial Irish “problem,” women’s suffrage, World War I, and the coming of the automobile. Born in Scotland to parents of Irish descent, he thought of himself as an Englishman, albeit one acutely conscious of his diverse ethnic makeup. To fill in the blanks left by Doyle’s sloppiness with dates, the editors, all Doyle scholars, provide commentary and a narrative continuum. A towering academic achievement, this is also an essential item for anyone interested in Doyle, his work, and his era.