On Conan Doyle

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Nov 25, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Michael Dirda
Princeton Univ
ISBN NA
$19.95

Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp

This fall features many new works on Arthur Conan Doyle and his most famous creation, including a lost novel by the author himself.

1. Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda began a lifelong obsession one dark and stormy night: Hiding under the covers, fueled by Orange Crush and Cracker Jack, the fifth-grader opened "The Hound of the Baskervilles," he writes in "On Conan Doyle"(Princeton Univ. Press, $19.95). Dirda intertwines his experiences as a young fan and now a member of the Baker Street Irregulars with an erudite tour of Conan Doyle's life and other writings. He makes a compelling case for the value of the author's supernatural, historical and science fiction - if not his treatises on spiritualism, which Conan Doyle valued more than his fiction. "We all make mistakes," Dirda writes. Conan Doyle himself comes across as a thoroughly decent, loyal man with amazing reserves of energy and a storyteller's instinct. "Above all, he argues that good writing should follow three rules," Dirda writes. "?'The first requisite is to be intelligible. The second is to be interesting. The third is to be clever.'?"

Yvonne Zipp reviews books for The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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