A "fictional biography" of the great detective duo, based on the "facts" presented in the canon of Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, augmented by various speculations proposed by the author and others.

Several years ago, I read W.S. Baring-Gould's Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, which was a similar sort of exercise, and while I appreciated the thought and enthusiasm that went into that work, I found it kind of tedious to get through, largely because it featured a weird combination of dwelling on details that only a truly obsessive Holmes fan would care about and endless recaps of stories you'd expect said obsessive Holmes fans to already know. Thomson, I think, does rather better on this score. She generally avoids the recap thing, reasoning that even if her readers aren't familiar with the stories, they'd probably rather read Doyle's versions than hers, and yet she still manages to produce something that's a lot more accessible to casual Holmes fans like yours truly.

Mind you, some of the topics she covers are a lot more interesting than others. I found her frequent return to the question of the stories' chronology and her attempts to resolve its contradictions, for instance, rather dull, even though she thoughtfully confines most of the really fiddly arguments on the subject to an appendix, which I admit to mostly skipping. And some of her Freudian-influenced speculations about Holmes' childhood had me rolling my eyes a bit. On the other hand, I was much more engaged by some of her other discussions, including the historical context of what Watson's training as an army doctor would have entailed and what action he might have seen in Afghanistan; a detailed account of events before and after Holmes' supposed death at Reichenbach Falls, complete with some thoughts about what might have been going on in his mind at the time; an argument defending Watson against accusations that he was a bad doctor who thought nothing of abandoning his patients to go chasing after Holmes; and, of course, the inevitable speculation on the identity of Watson's second wife.

Thomson's main focus is supposedly on the characters of Holmes and Watson and the friendship between them, and, given that, I was a little disappointed that there wasn't more of an attempt to get deeper into their psyches (although given the weird Freudian stuff at the beginning, maybe I should be glad of that). Still, overall, I'd say it's worth a look for the Holmes enthusiast. ( )

This book is a 'fictional biography' of Holmes and Watson, traced through their cases and the clues in the canon. June Thomson is an accomplished writer of Holmes pastiche stories, and knows her subject and its background very well. This book is therefore of greatest interest to those already familiar with the Holmes stories. It is written with affection as well as knowledge. It does of course ask for the suspension of disbelief that Holmesian scholarship mostly involves and readers will vary in how happy they are to cope with that. But for any fan of Doyle's work, this is a very readable and useful book. ( )

outstanding. at times, it feels like looking through an old photograph album reminiscing about family & friends not seen in many years. a real informative book.