The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle's Detective Fiction

Reveals the secrets and stories that lie beneath the surface of Watson’s narratives

The Case of Sherlock Holmes uncovers what is untold, partly told, wrongly told, or deliberately concealed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga. This engaging study uses a scholarly approach, combining close reading with historicism, to read the stories afresh, sceptically probing Dr Watson’s narratives and Holmes’s often barely credible solutions. Drawing on Victorian and Edwardian history, Conan Doyle’s life and works, and Doyle’s literary sources, the book offers new insights into the Holmes stories and reveals what they say about money, class, family, sex, race, war, and secrecy.

Key Features

• New insights into the ever-popular Holmes stories
• New contexts for late-Victorian and Edwardian detective fiction, from forgotten scandals to the social controversies of the age
• A literary-critical approach to these popular works that is both scholarly and accessible