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A Study in Surmise: The Making of Sherlock Holmes
Michael Harrison

        Table of Contents

        Introduction by Ellery Queen
         Acknowledgments
        A Word to the Reader
    1. Dr. Conan Doyle Reads The Times
    2. A Baker Vanishes
    3. The First Scherer Encounter
    4. The Tragedy of Edmund Galley
    5. The King vs. Galley
    6. The Fight To Save Galley
    7. The Vindication of Edmund Galley
    8. Galley: The Proof from Name-Use
    9. General Gordon: Godfather of the Baker Street Irregulars
    10. Dr. Bell and Dr. Watson
    11. The English Opium-Eater
    Appendices
        I. The Code of the Canon
        II. Conanical Nomenclature
        III. Dr. Sam Johnson: Criminologist and Detective
        IV. The Tragedy of Mrs. Florence Chandler Maybrick
    Index

    (1984)

e-Book, 258 pp. with illos & Index (Tina Rhea #62)
ISBN 978-1-55497-315-6    $10.00


    Introduction by Ellery Queen

In the Introduction to Ellery Queen’s suppressed anthology, The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (1944), we wrote: "Someone has said that more has been written about Sherlock Holmes than about any other character in fiction. It is further true that more has been written about Holmes by others than by Doyle himself." As the years pass since the first Sherlock Holmes story was published—A Study in Scarlet (1887)—the two statements quoted above become more and more incontestable. Indeed, many Sherlockian devotees may have wondered if anything new can still be written about the creation of Sherlock Holmes—hasn’t everything already been said?

The answer is no: not all has been learned, and not all will ever be learned. The well of speculation and conjecture is bottomless, and research about Sherlock Holmes will never die, or even fade away. The interest, perhaps the fanaticism, in the creative sources of Sherlock Holmes is eternal.

And now Michael Harrison, author of In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes (1958), has engaged in some new and remarkable research, tracking down hitherto unknown and unsuspected origins of The Great Detective, and has come up with what we unhesitatingly describe as the most important discovery in Sherlockiana of the past decade, perhaps of the past quarter of a century. No, we’ll go even further: perhaps the most important Holmesian discovery possible to have been made since the death in 1930 of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the only one who knew all the Sherlockian answers ...