Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography

"In this new unauthorized biography, Nick Rennison challenges the previous account of Sherlock Holmes by Dr. John Watson to present a portrait of the man behind the magnifying glass." "He has been called it genius and a fraud, a hero and an addict. He advised kings in their glittering palaces, then disappeared into the darkest alleys of London's criminal underworld. He was (and remains) a global icon, but he could pass his most ardent fan on the street without a flicker of recognition. Who was this Sherlock Holmes?" "With an attention to detail that would make his subject envious. Rennison gathers the clues of a life lived among the stars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Oscar Wilde to Sigmund Freud, and uncovers startling, previously unknown information. How did a Cambridge dropout and bit player on the London stage transform himself into a renowned consulting detective? Did he know the identity of Jack the Ripper? When did Holmes and his nemesis Professor Moriarty first cross paths and how were dangerous Irish nationalists involved? What carefully plotted conspiracy led Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to declare that Holmes was merely a literary invention? To where did Sherlock Holmes disappear after his presumed death in 1891? How was he able to get into Lhasa, Tibet, when all Westerners were forbidden, and what was he doing in Khartoum and Persia? Did Sherlock Holmes, protector of the innocent, commit the very act he so often worked to prevent, the cold-blooded, premeditated murder of Moriarty?" "Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography answers these questions and many more as it careens through the most infamous crimes and historic events of the Victorian age, all in pursuit of the real man behind the greatest detective in modern fiction - and, just perhaps, nonfiction."--BOOK JACKET.Nick Rennison is the author of 'Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography' with ISBN 9780871139474 and ISBN 0871139472.