Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes

Name: Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes
Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
SKU: 9780374609498
Price: 36.00 USD
Availability: InStock

$36.00

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Biographical Note:
Lindsey Fitzharris is a New York Times bestselling author whose books include The Butchering Art and The Facemaker. Along with her husband, Adrian Teal, she also writes children's nonfiction, including Dead Ends!: Flukes, Flops, and Failures That Sparked Medical Marvels and Plague-Busters!: Medicine's Battles with History's Deadliest Diseases. She holds a PhD in the history of science and medicine from the University of Oxford and has written for The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, The Guardian, The Lancet, and other major publications.

Publisher Marketing:

The untold story of the Edinburgh doctor who became Arthur Conan Doyle's model for Sherlock Holmes, and his adventures in the criminal underworld of Victorian Britain.

Throughout nineteenth-century Edinburgh, the surgeon Joseph Bell was known for his extraordinary talent for detection and diagnosis. To the amazement of onlookers at the Royal Infirmary, he could read a patient's ailments, occupation, and personal habits from a single glance. Though such deductive powers were all quite "elementary" to Bell, they had a profound influence on the medical student and budding writer Arthur Conan Doyle. Soon enough, Bell's methods helped spark the creation of fiction's most iconic detective.

Since Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887, he has become a global phenomenon. Yet the man Conan Doyle credited as Sherlock's prototype has slipped into the shadows. In Sleuth-Hound, the New York Times bestselling author Lindsey Fitzharris brings Bell center stage, recounting how his work took him from ward to witness box as a medical detective probing murder and misdeeds. He worked closely and covertly with the police surgeon Henry Duncan Littlejohn and a pioneering ballistics expert named Dr. Watson, and even collaborated with Conan Doyle to overturn a homicide conviction. Bell's forensic investigations took him from gaslit alleyways to Gilded Age drawing rooms, put him on the trail of poisoners and child killers, and even drew him into the hunt for Jack the Ripper.

By scrutinizing a scratch on a desk, a trace of cigar ash, or the slightest peculiarity of a man's gait, Bell could turn the smallest clues into revelations. His sharp mind forever changed the way we read bodies, detect crimes, and serve justice.

Contributor Bio:Fitzharris, Lindsey
Lindsey Fitzharris is the bestselling author of The Butchering Art and The Facemaker. Dr. Fitzharris, who holds a Ph.D. in the History of Science and Medicine from Oxford University, regularly writes for the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, the Guardian, the Lancet, and other major publications. She is also the writer and host of the Smithsonian Channel TV series The Curious Life and Death of....