Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
This is a very "rich" book; full of facts and details trying to create a complete life for Sherlock Holmes. As the author as biographer notes, there are 56 short stories and 4 longer ones as written by Watson (a couple penned by SH) and published through Conan Doyle. That's not much when you consider it spans a working life of more than 25 years. (Of course no pastiche, no matter how well-written is used as material for this book.) It is to fill in the blanks in both Holmes' ancestry and long life (he dies in 1929) that the author turns his energy and creativity to.To have produced this book required a considerable amount of research in to Victorian and post-Victorian England. Not merely to glean the "flavor" of the times and the people, but to get the facts about criminal, social, political and international events during the 80-odd years that the book covers in some depth. The author begins with historical facts about these elements (including education and English country life) and produces a book that tells us of Mycroft, Sherlock, Watson; how their lives ran, how they interacted, and how they influenced history. It's easy to tell that Mr. Rennison took this task to be a most serious one and wanted it to be taken seriously by SH fans. All-in-all, he has done an admirable job and this is a book that many readers will enjoy.I write all this because it is a very full book and a very serious one. It presents its "facts" with a straight face throughout just as Conan Doyle's tales purport to be real cases. For many people they will be perfectly satisfied with the end product of the author's labors. The book does succeed in being a comprehensive biography of the man, but I found a couple of problems. First off the book is very dry and second it is too short and I think these two issues are linked.The style of the book is; fact, fact, fact, inference, fact, inference, etcetera. The anecdotes that are included are meant to explain away some period of time. Seldom are they used to color the man. Because there has been so much written about Holmes and how every nuance of every story is tells us about the man, I suspect that the author wanted to hold to a neutral course as much as possible. He does present specific comments on certain major events in the detective's life (e.g. Irene Adler), but these are few. It only takes comparison with some of the great biographies of the last 20 years to see the differences. One of the key differences is the "richness" of the biography, which inevitably means making a book longer. Richness is accomplished in a couple of different way. First, by putting in both longer and more excerpts from published and unpublished materials. Second, by humanizing the story with more views (sources) and more commentary (or analysis). However, incorporating more material into the book could have made it merely a longer, dry book. Ultimately it is the author's style that determines the tone of the work. Perhaps I will look up another work by Mr. Rennison to see what his is.If you like inventive fiction (within certain hard constraints in this case) and have any affection for the Great Detective, then I do recommend this book. Perhaps you will agree with my opinion, perhaps you will think that it is an engaging (it is mostly) and perfectly lush description of his life and times. Not matter what I hope you will enjoy it.
This is a 3.5 star rating, bumped up by the obvious ingenuity and careful crafting by the author. I highly recommend this book for anyone who has ever taken the time to look up the background surrounding the Holmes stories. I think it speaks the the excellence of the book, and some of the problems, that my main problem with it was how difficult it was to untangle the parts invented by the author from the meticulous historical research obviously undertaken by the author.I read this at the same time I watched season 2 of the updated Sherlock with Cumberbatch and was pleasantly surprised how well they meshed with one another. I think the only irritation I have with the narrative was that it turned him into a sort of proto James Bond type character. I just didn't buy into it.
What do You think about Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography (2007)?
Comprei esse livro para completer número numa promoção da Better World Books – e porque fiquei curiosa para saber o que diabos alguém escreveria numa biografia de Sherlock Holmes...É um livro bizarro, mas serviu para me introduzir a alguns fatos históricos que eu desconhecia – e que ajudam a entender, por exemplo, o desprezo de Holmes pelos detetives da Scotland Yard (especialmente nas primeiras histórias) e o significado das viagens dele durante o período do Grande Hiato.Algumas teorias apresentadas também merecem consideração. Gostei particularmente da ligação feita entre Moriarty e os terroristas irlandeses ou a sugestão de que antes de se tornar um detetive, Holmes teria chegado a trabalhar como ator.Vale pela curiosidade, se você é um fã devotado de Holmes, daquele que lê as histórias como quem está diante do evangelho e joga ‘O Grande Jogo’ procurando formas de sustentar a idéia de que Doyle escrevia histórias de personagens bem reais e não mera ficção.(e se você gosta de genealogias, Nick Rennison faz uma árvore genealógica do detetive que alcança até Charles I, no período das guerras civis...)
—Luciana Darce
Eh.I LOVED the idea of this book. And I am just having the hardest time putting my finger on why I didn't really enjoy it that much. It wasn't too long and wasn't grueling to read. But I found myself annoyed with the very thing I thought I would enjoy--placing Sherlock Holmes into the real world of the time his tales were set. Partly it's that the author didn't (or wasn't able to) come up with enough real evidence to support the "biographical account." So instead it all comes across as assumption without much reasoning behind it. It may be that the tales don't give much support for any very detailed invented biography of Holmes. If so, I might have abandoned the project if I were the author. Instead, Rennison chooses to write "we can presume that..." and similar phrases regularly throughout the book. For me, that really detracted from the original idea of the book somehow. I know it's an invented biography of a fictional character, but for me the whole point of that structure is to provide a feeling of scholarship and legitimacy.
—Elizabeth
I've been fond of Sherlock Holmes ever since my mom let me, age 10 or so, confiscate her library card when I'd gone through most of the children's section. This highly entertaining, well researched, and well written pseudo-biography brought back good reading memories and the compulsion to go back to those clever stories I've been reading for decades. Rennison does a superb job of putting together all the pieces of Holmes' life -- all the ones he can find, that is -- as well as Mycroft's and Watson's and even Moriarty's; and supplementing that scant information with the history, the actual history, that was going on during his supposed lifetime. The biography must be shelved with fiction, of course, but it has the clamor of truth in its exploration of the times of the several decades on either side of the last century.
—Kathy Petersen
