Sherlock fans will probably enjoy Conan Doyle for the Defense

No, it doesn’t feature Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, but Conan Doyle for the Defense does go more into how Sherlock Holmes bled into real life.

Conan Doyle for the Defense is not like a lot of other nonfiction books. For one, yours truly doesn’t get sent many of them. But the package from Random House containing the advance proof arrived on my desk, and let’s face it: I might not be a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes, but I do like it, and this has an intriguing premise.

How did Holmes’s creator end up getting a man out of prison after 20 years? Well, he basically pulled a Holmes. Margalit Fox’s book ventures off on a lot of tangents… We spend a chapter with Joseph Bell, for instance, learning more about him. But at the core, that’s the story. Ultimately, it serves as a pretty good introduction into how to think like the detective himself, and by extension, Arthur Conan Doyle.

Fox is even preoccupied with actually interrogating some of Conan Doyle’s methods of thinking; at times, it almost seems like she’s more interested in how perfectly Victorian he was rather than actually digging into the details of the murder at the center of the story. She even includes the use of a word acceptable then, but which is not acceptable now. One that refers to the Roma people, in a quote from Adrian Conan Doyle, which appears both in the ARC and a digital copy of the book I checked for reference. Granted, she is quoting someone else. Still, it is not something that seems to need quoting when that Conan Doyle makes his point twice over, once without using words that do not get used anymore.

At the same time, though, it’s hard not to see how the puzzle presented by the murder of Marion Gilchrist intrigued Conan Doyle and would have intrigued Holmes, aided by the use of stories from the canon. In that arena, Fox does particularly well, and it’s where fans of the stories will find the most fun in this story; she also does a good job talking about Oscar Slater, the man falsely imprisoned for the murder.

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For fans of Sherlock who don’t see the need to reread the stories yet again this summer, Conan Doyle for the Defense presents a pretty acceptable alternative.