In The Real Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Hoehling details the adventurous life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from his youth in a poor nineteenth century neighborhood in Edinburgh to his later years in the early twentieth century, when he had become an internationally famous writer. Her narrative progresses chronologically through nineteen chapters and is followed by a bibliography of works both about and by Doyle, as well as an index. The book is written in the third person, except for short excerpts from correspondence, quotations from Doyle’s works, and a number of fictionalized conversations between Doyle and members of his family, his friends, or his associates.

Although Doyle was a prolific writer on a wide variety of historical, political, and fictional subjects, his reputation continues to rest on the unique characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, whose exploits and subsequent popularity tended to overshadow their creator even during his lifetime. Hoehling’s opinion is that, despite the obvious model for Holmes in Doyle’s medical professor, Dr. Joseph Bell, and the writer’s eventual rejection of his most famous creation, the remarkable detective was very much an extension of Doyle’s own personality and interests.

Hoehling follows Doyle from the age of nine through the major events in his life. These events include his education in a variety of schools, his ups and downs as a young medical doctor, his gifts as a storyteller and later amateur writer of short stories, his ultimate choice of a literary career, the illness and death of his first wife and his subsequent remarriage, his travels, and his efforts on behalf of the less fortunate, especially persons whom he believed had been wrongly accused.

In 1893, after six years of growing success with his Holmes, stories, Doyle had become increasingly unhappy with the attention paid to the detective in preference to what he considered his best literary efforts: his historical novels Micah Clarke (1889) and The While Company (1891). Therefore, in that year, he contrived for Holmes to meet his death, along with the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty, in “The Final Problem.”

Readers throughout the world were outraged, and Doyle finally agreed to resurrect Holmes in 1903. In the meantime, however, he had written other works, traveled extensively, become a foreign correspondent, and served as a medical volunteer in the Boer War (18991902), being knighted in August, 1902. Although too old for active duty in World War I, he wrote extensively for the British government, and in his later years became deeply involved in spiritualism. Doyle was one of the most creative individuals of his generation, as is demonstrated by the only partial listing of his works at the end of Hoehling’s bibliography.