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Title: Teller of Tales : The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle by Daniel Stashower, Sherlock Holmes ISBN: 0-8050-6684-5 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: 23 January, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.69 (13 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Conan Doyle From the Outside
Comment: Daniel Stashower's biography of Conan Doyle is well written, as one would expect from the author of the Houdini mysteries, but never profound. We are given the great man's public life without any deep examination of the inner man. The result is a rather straightforward narrative, interesting because Conan Doyle led a fascinating life, but with all the weight of a magazine profile. The complete absence of citations reinforces this impression, and there are no footnotes, although a comprehensive bibliography is included.
Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent Biography
Comment: Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle was a complex and honorable man. Toward the end of his life he embraced spiritualisim as he did everything else, wholeheartedly, and this led to many people dismissing him as a crackpot. However, as author Daniel Stashower pointst out, such was not the case. Conan-Doyle really believed in life after death. This belief filled the void in his life that was left when he renounced his belief in the Catholic Church. Daniel Stashower has written an even-handed fair biography of Conan-Doyle. The book is well researched and Conan-Doyle comes to life on these pages. Conan-Doyle, of course, is best known for creating Sherlock Holmes but as Stashower shows Conan-Doyle wrote many more works of fiction and non-fiction in his long career. If you want to have an idea of what made the man behind Sherlock Holmes tick then I recommend this book highly.
Rating: 5
Summary: Conan Doyle Comes to Life...
Comment: Years ago I read the biographies of Conan Doyle by John Dickson Carr and Charles Higham, and even tried to get beyond Sherlock Holmes by reading as much as I could of Conan Doyle's other fiction. Therefore I thought I knew something about Conan Doyle as a writer and as a person, but Stashower's fine book was still a revelation to me; it's not an exaggeration to say that I found new insights into Sir Arthur on nearly every page.
Stashower has done his research, but he is also unafraid to use Conan Doyle's semiautobiographical fiction, not to mention his poetry, to provide windows into the inner Sir Arthur that Sir Arthur's own autobiography carefully conceals.
Sir Arthur, of course, created a character that (along with Tarzan) is one of the immortal icons of adventure fiction, a character as popular today as he was when his short stories first hit the STRAND Magazine like a thunderbolt. One thing everyone knows about Conan Doyle is how deeply he resented the fame of Sherlock Holmes, but even here Stashower has some startling information to relate.
He is particularly good on the last couple of decades of Sir Arthur's life, when his seemingly mindless advocacy of even the most infantile and transparently fradulent aspects of Spiritualism, and his output of nearly a dozen unreadable religious tracts, left almost all of his readers convinced he had lost his mind. His endorsement of the authenticity of some photographs of fairies supposedly taken by two little girls (who had actually cut the tiny figures out of very familiar magazine ads for Fairy Soap!), and his calling in a psychic detective to "solve" the not-very-mysterious disappearance of novelist Agatha Christie, were the final straws for even his most tolerant fans.
On top of it all Sir Arthur was a terrible judge of the relative merits of his own fiction, and anyone who attempts to read his entire fictional output, as I did some years ago and as Stashower obviously has, will see how sadly he frittered away and squandered his unique gifts as a "teller of tales."
How could a man who created one of the immortal icons of rationality be in person so gullible, irrational, foolish and unworldly? Well, Stashower does as good a job of explaining the apparent paradox as anyone will probably be able to do. Highly recommended.
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Title: The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Martin Booth ISBN: 0312242514 Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur Pub. Date: February, 2000 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: The True Crime Files of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Arthur Conan Doyle, Steven Womack, Stephan Hines ISBN: 0425189007 Publisher: Prime Crime Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ISBN: 0517220784 Publisher: Gramercy Pub. Date: 03 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.99 |
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Title: Hogarth: A Life and a World by Jenny Uglow ISBN: 0374528519 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 02 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by John Dickson Carr, Adrian Conan Doyle ISBN: 0517203383 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 11 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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