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Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography

nick rennison

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He has been called a genius and a fraud, a hero and an addict. He advised kings in their glittering palaces, then disappeared into the darkest alleys of London’s criminal underworld. He was (and remains) a global icon, but he could pass his most ardent fan on the street without a flicker of recognition. Who was this Sherlock Holmes? With an attention to detail that would make his subject envious, Nick Rennison gathers the clues of a life lived among the stars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Oscar Wilde to Sigmund Freud, and uncovers startling, previously unknown information. How did a Cambridge drop-out and bit player on the London stage transform himself into a renowned “consulting detective”? Did he know the identity of “Jack the Ripper”? When did Holmes and his nemesis Professor Moriarty first cross paths? To where did Sherlock Holmes disappear after his presumed “death” in 1891? Sherlock Holmes answers these questions and many more as it careens through the most infamous crimes and historic events of the era, all in pursuit of the real man behind the greatest detective in modern fiction—and, just perhaps, non-fiction.

280 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1,2005

This edition

Format
280 pages, Hardcover
Published
January 1, 2005 by Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN
9780871139474
ASIN
0871139472
Language
English
Characters More characters
  • Arthur Conan Doyle (Goodreads)

    Arthur Conan Doyle (goodreads)

    Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a Scottish writer and medical doctor. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 when he published A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and more than fifty short stories about Holmes and Dr....

  • James Moriarty

    James Moriarty

    Professor Moriarty is Sherlock Holmes arch-nemesis, dubbed The Napoleon of crime. A genius in his own right.more...

  • John Watson

    John Watson

    Dr. Watson is the friend and confidant of Sherlock Holmes, and recorder of his escapades. We meet him as a practicing physician with patients across London. He gets married during the series. Formerly a surgeon with the British Army....

  • Sherlock Holmes

    Sherlock Holmes

    Arthur Conan Doyles great contribution to detective fiction and one of the best known literary characters of all time. A genius, by his own admission, with many eccentricities. He first appeared in the short story A Scandal in Bohemia in...

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About the author

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nick rennison

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Community Reviews

Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 43 votes)
5 stars
17(40%)
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13(30%)
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43 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Bosy_ElZiny
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Can a biography of a fictional character be classified as nonfiction ... Of course, when it's a character as indisputably real as Sherlock Homes.

But Rennison does much more than scribble down the "facts" of Holmes' life. He explores the culture and historic events that are the context of Holmes' times, even including what he was doing during that Great Hiatus after the Reichenbach Falls incident.

Great fun for a Sherlock fan.
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-Mullerio-
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This has been attempted before, but not so perfectly or successfully. A biography of Holmes as a real character, seamlessly woven into real characters and facts of his era, until it could fool even very seasoned Sherlockians- with reflreshing views into much tackled issues like Holmes and Jack the Ripper, the Great Hiatus or "friends" like Wilde or Conan Doyle himself. A great work of research to feed the imagination- it may sound paradoxical but it is not. Wonderful.
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BohemianRhapsody
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This book was eh. I didn't hate it but I didn't particularly enjoy it. It was just about getting through it for me. I can't put my finger on what exactly put me off but it was just not my cup of tea. there is one thing that I know put me off and that was the writer's tone and style. I found it a little bit pompous and at times very pretentious and that made the going rough.
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broke_and_brown
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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4 Sterne

Eine nicht autorisierte Biografie über den größten und einzigen beratenen Detektiven der Welt? Jawoll!

Jeder kennt Sherlock Holmes aus Büchern, Filmen, Serien, etc., aber niemand weiß wirklich wer dieser Mann ist. Wie wuchs er auf, wie entwickelte er sein Interesse für Kriminologie, woher seine Mysogynie, was machte er in der Zeit wo er seinen Tod vortäuschte, wieso starb er einsam? Alles Fragen auf die hier eine Antwort gegeben wird. Das Leben und Wirken Sherlocks wird anhand von Dokumenten und den überlieferten Geschichten des Doktor Watson rekonstruiert und analysiert. Geschickt wird Fakt und Fiktion miteinander verknüpft und man hat mehr als einmal das Gefühl die Biografie einer realen Person zu lesen.

Das Buch hat seine Längen, in denen z.B. über Unruhen innerhalb der britischen Kolonialherrschaft berichtet wird, ich hätte drauf verzichten können, aber sie gehören dazu. Man lernt wo die Holmesbrüder ihre Finger mit im Spiel hatten. Sogar Jack the Ripper hat seinen Auftritt...

Ich habe die Biografie sehr genossen, sie war unterhaltsam auf die britische Art und man hat etwas neues über Sherlock Holmes gelernt. Ich könnte mir vorstellen dieses Buch wieder mal zur Hand zu nehmen.
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StrawbbDevilCake
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Eh.

I LOVED the idea of this book. And I am just having the hardest time putting my finger on why I didn't really enjoy it that much.

It wasn't too long and wasn't grueling to read. But I found myself annoyed with the very thing I thought I would enjoy--placing Sherlock Holmes into the real world of the time his tales were set. Partly it's that the author didn't (or wasn't able to) come up with enough real evidence to support the "biographical account." So instead it all comes across as assumption without much reasoning behind it. It may be that the tales don't give much support for any very detailed invented biography of Holmes. If so, I might have abandoned the project if I were the author.

Instead, Rennison chooses to write "we can presume that..." and similar phrases regularly throughout the book. For me, that really detracted from the original idea of the book somehow. I know it's an invented biography of a fictional character, but for me the whole point of that structure is to provide a feeling of scholarship and legitimacy.

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blandmaster
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I've been fond of Sherlock Holmes ever since my mom let me, age 10 or so, confiscate her library card when I'd gone through most of the children's section. This highly entertaining, well researched, and well written pseudo-biography brought back good reading memories and the compulsion to go back to those clever stories I've been reading for decades.

Rennison does a superb job of putting together all the pieces of Holmes' life -- all the ones he can find, that is -- as well as Mycroft's and Watson's and even Moriarty's; and supplementing that scant information with the history, the actual history, that was going on during his supposed lifetime. The biography must be shelved with fiction, of course, but it has the clamor of truth in its exploration of the times of the several decades on either side of the last century.
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Jean77
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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An excellent capstone to reading the canon. Explains various loose threads in a believable way. Written in the spirit of The Great Game. Thoroughly researched. I could not tell the difference between the “real” and the “fictitious” history. Highly recommended for all Sherlockians.
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JayRemys
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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A unique take on Holmes, showing how, in between the cases recorded by his Boswell, he took part in various adventures related to British national security.
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