Sherlock Holmes is one of the few literary inventions still captivating audiences well after its creator settled into dust. Growing apace with the tastes of his audience—seamlessly transitioning from print, to stage, to screen—Holmes has, as Zach Dundas, Executive Editor at Portland Monthly, so well describes in his intellectual biography of the famed sleuth, an immortal life that would cause a Falstaff or Ebenezer Scrooge envy.
The first thing to note about The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes, is Dundas’s stellar turn of phrase, lending the book the quality of a well polished, punchy essay instead of the cutesy (but altogether too long, boring, or insubstantial) biographies that all seem to start with a variation on the same title, viz. The [fill in adjective here] Life of What’s-His-Face. One reads with the same attention Dundas’s autobiographical vignettes (which turn out to play a prominent role in the book) as one does the biographical elements of Arthur Conan Doyle and his tiresome (Doyle’s sentiment, not mine!) invention.
