The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes’s popularity prompted Dundas (The Renegade Sportsman) to investigate how and why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s hero and his sidekick, Dr. Watson, have endured for so long. Dundas strives to use the detective’s famed techniques to ferret out Conan Doyle’s influences—Poe, pioneering surgeon Joseph Bell—and chronicle the influence Holmes has exercised through parodies, tributes, plays, films, TV series, and even comic books and fan fiction. The work is admirably exhaustive, but it’s also exhausting. Despite a rigorous Sherlockian “commitment to the facts,” lengthy personal digressions, such as Dundas’s tour of Dartmoor, the setting for The Hound of the Baskervilles, with his family, seem more self-serving than illuminating. Dundas’s admiration for Holmes is never in doubt, and he unearths some interesting anecdotes about Conan Doyle: Holmes’s creator was an early auto enthusiast (who “collected speeding tickets”) and had an interest in spiritualism, and as a writer, Conan Doyle was amusingly “reckless about accuracy” and character consistency. But Dundas’s smug tone, strained attempts at humor with David Foster Wallace–like footnotes, and tendency to synopsize plots are wearying. If only Dundas, like Sherlock, had simply “seen and observed” his fascinating material. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Trident Media Group. (June)