Sherlock Holmes, a Study in Sources!

Donald Redmond

Cover by Laurie Fraser Manifold

A second, revised and expanded edition

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote sixty tales about Sherlock Holmes and sketched in them more than 800 characters. Holmes and Dr Watson faced Professor Moriarty, Charles Augustus Milverton, Dr Grimesby Roylott, John Clay, "Holy" Peters, and many more. In Sherlock Holmes, a Study in Sources Donald Redmond offers the solution to a Conan Doyle mystery: where did the author find names for his characters? Redmond's detective work reveals that Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard was named for an Edinburgh classmate; Professor Moriarty for a chaplain in the Royal Navy, and 600 others for policemen and parsons, sportsmen, soldiers, and solicitors, from India to the Boer War to suburban London. Why did Doyle do it? To add realism to the stories of the Master Detective.

Redmond prowled library stacks in England and Canada as well as the streets of London and other English cities to accumulate evidence including statistical tabulations and the more than 500 items in his bibliography. He traces Conan Doyle's life from his early days as a Southsea doctor to his last Holmes stories written in Crowborough, Sussex. His neighbours and acquaintances are identified and their names can be found in the Sherlock Holmes canon. Readers of A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and The Hound of the Baskervilles will find familiar names in this book and will often be surprised at just whose names were used in the tales of the famous detective. Come, Watson, come ... the game is still afoot, in London of 1895 and in Sherlock Holmes, a Study in Sources!

Cloth Cover Hard Cover with Full Colour Dustjacket, 430 pp. with Index
ISBN 1-55246-448-2 $48.00

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