ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE — MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES. First American Edition, 1924
Arthur Conan Doyle’s autobiography, including his own account of the origins of Sherlock Holmes.
DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN (1859–1930). Memories and Adventures. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1924. First American edition. Original publisher’s cloth lettered in gilt. Illustrated with photographic plates.
Published in 1924, Memories and Adventures is Conan Doyle’s account of the life behind Sherlock Holmes: his medical education in Edinburgh, beginnings as a writer, travels, sporting life, public controversies, and the extraordinary success of the detective he had once tried to kill off.
Among its most interesting passages is Doyle’s account of Dr. Joseph Bell, the Edinburgh physician under whom he studied as a young medical student. Bell possessed an extraordinary ability to infer a patient’s occupation, habits, and background from minute physical details. Doyle later acknowledged that he drew upon Bell’s method when creating Sherlock Holmes, transforming clinical observation into the detective’s celebrated powers of deduction.
The autobiography also returns repeatedly to Holmes himself, with chapters devoted to “Of Sherlock Holmes” and “Sidelights on Sherlock Holmes.” The result is an unusual companion to the stories: Conan Doyle looking back at the experiences and personalities from which one of literature’s most recognizable characters emerged.
CONDITION
Original publisher’s cloth with minor wear and scuffing. A very good copy.
OFFERED SEPARATELY
Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear, first edition, New York, 1914 — the fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel, in the true first book edition preceding the London issue of 1915.
