book review the devil and sherlock holmes

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“The Devil and Sherlock Holmes” (Book Review)

Like a lot of people, I enjoy reading Sherlock Holmes books because it never ceases to amaze me how Holmes takes the smallest detail and cracks a case wide open. After cruising through David Grann’s book “Killers of the Flower Moon” I found myself loving his journalistic approach to storytelling, which is why when I saw “The Devil and Sherlock Holmes” by Grann I grabbed it immediately.

In yellow letters, a stark contrast to the darkly colored cover, reads “Tales of murder, madness, and obsession.” Who wouldn’t be intrigued by that line?

In the nearly 400-page book, Grann takes a deep dive into true stories about a dozen people’s lives: to investigate their stories that might seem bigger than life. Grann’s words weave us through the search for a giant squid, a Sherlock Holmes fanatic, an elderly bank robber’s life, and a con artist who might’ve been conned himself.

Each story feels like it’s own book, but is often under 100 pages, because none of the stories relate to one another and Grann’s talent for creating a mental image of the story is unnervingly accurate throughout these pages.

His book is split into three parts, which are all named with quotes from Holmes, and contain four stories each:

Part One: “Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.”

Part Two: “A strange enigma is man!”

Part Three: “All that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe.”

As to not spoil all of the stories, a few that stuck out to me included “Trial by Fire,” “The Chameleon,” “The Squid Hunter,” “City of Water,” and “The Brand.” Evidently from their titles, it shows how diverse Grann was in the stories he shared.

Grann, a journalist by trade, conducts the most in-depth and time-consuming research for each of these articles, which were written across several years in the early 2000s. It seems from every story that Grann made some kind of intimate connection with those he interviewed, as some shared personal, traumatic details about their lives.

“Trial by Fire” is the second story in the book and made my heart hurt for a man who was on death row, convicted of murdering his three daughters, who were all three years old or younger. Cameron Todd Willingham, the father and convicted murderer, went to trial after his house caught on fire, trapping his daughters inside, because arson investigators said that it was arson, without a doubt. After many years on death row, Willingham thought he found his lucky break that would prove his innocence, but will anyone believe him in time?

The next story switches gears in “The Chameleon,” which starts off as a story about a young boy stumbling into a child-welfare building in France. It ends with the same boy pretending to be someone else in Texas. How can this be the same person? Let’s just say he’s good at playing pretend.

“The Squid Hunter,” is the first story in Part Two, and sends Grann onto a boat in the middle of a storm, looking for what some call the sea’s most elusive creature. Grann shadows Steve O’Shea as he continues his life-long journey to find the giant squid, which appears in tales dating back to the Iliad. Can the pair find the squid, or will the voyage be a bust?

The “City of Water” story brought an issue to my mind that I never thought was a problem: What would happen if New York City ran out of water? Grann goes 200 feet underground with a group of sandhogs, which are workers that tunnel below NYC to bring them a fresh supply of water. Who knew that was a career? He follows a family who has been sandhogs for generations, as Grann learns the history of the three tunnels, how the dig process has changed, and just how dangerous it can be underground.

Finally, “The Brand,” better known as the Aryan Brotherhood starts the beginning of the end in Part Three. I knew very little about The Brand before reading this story, but learning more about this organized crime group within prisons was equally fascinating and terrifying. The ruthless group has created a hierarchy in the prison systems to ensure power for themselves, but the group has continued to adapt as more of its lifelong brothers are released back into society. Grann interviews a few of The Brand’s leaders and talks with a man who is building a case against the organization. How do you discipline a group of people who are already serving life sentences?

Grann’s seven other stories split off into other directions and cover a wide range of topics that readers might not have ever heard or thought of before. If you aren’t much of a reader, but like thinking “Hmm, I didn’t even know that existed,” then you need to go pick up your own copy of “The Devil and Sherlock Holmes.”

Emily Loughridge is a third-year Communication major at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma.

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The Devil and Sherlock Holmes Summary and Reviews

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The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession

by David Grann

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Published Mar 2010 352 pages Genre: Essays Publication Information

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Book summary.

Acclaimed New Yorker writer and author of the breakout debut bestseller The Lost City of Z , David Grann offers a collection of spellbinding narrative journalism. Whether he’s reporting on the infiltration of the murderous Aryan Brotherhood into the U.S. prison system, tracking down a chameleon con artist in Europe, or riding in a cyclone- tossed skiff with a scientist hunting the elusive giant squid, David Grann revels in telling stories that explore the nature of obsession and that piece together true and unforgettable mysteries. Each of the dozen stories in this collection reveals a hidden and often dangerous world and, like Into Thin Air and The Orchid Thief , pivots around the gravitational pull of obsession and the captivating personalities of those caught in its grip. There is the world’s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes who is found dead in mysterious circumstances; an arson sleuth trying to prove that a man about to be executed is innocent; and sandhogs racing to complete the brutally dangerous job of building New York City’s water tunnels before the old system collapses. Throughout, Grann’s hypnotic accounts display the power—and often the willful perversity—of the human spirit. Compulsively readable, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant mosaic of ambition, madness, passion, and folly.

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"Grann writes these true stories in the readable fashion of a good journalist. As such, they're highly recommended to readers who enjoy a variety of accessible insights into human nature." - Library Journal

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David Grann is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z . Killers of the Flower Moon was a finalist for the National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of The White Darkness and the collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes . Grann's investigative reporting has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and children in New York.

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Book review: The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

David Grann. The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession . New York: Doubleday, 2010. 352 pages.

Great non-fiction is just as suspenseful and revealing of the human condition as great fiction. With The Devil and Sherlock Holmes , David Grann gives the reader twelve intriguing pieces of great non-fiction.

The collection starts with a short introduction in which Grann lays out the thematic (though not topical) unity of the book: each of the pieces is, in some way, about sleuthing. Whether its investigating a murder, looking for a half-mythical sea creature, or seeking to recover lost memories, the people who move through these pages are all looking for something.

After the introduction comes the chapter which likely gave the book its title: an investigation into the death, under mysterious circumstances, of the world’s foremost Sherlock Holmes expert. If this were an episode of a TV police procedural, most viewers would dismiss it as ridiculously contrived: the expert, who was himself unraveling the mystery of a cache of lost Holmesiana, was found dead of an apparent suicide that would have baffled the Baker Street detective himself. Grann not only hooks the reader into the case; he gives the reader a glimpse into the world of Holmes devotees, a group that makes Trekkies look like they treat Star Trek with a casual irreverence. But Grann doesn’t make them into geeks or misfits; he instead communicates the enduring appeal of Holmes in an increasingly chaotic world in a way that might have you checking a few Arthur Conan Dolye books out of the library. I can’t think of any better testament to Grann’s skill or style as a writer.

Other stories are no less riveting. Some of the more gripping ones are the tale of Krystian Bala, a would-be philosopher and author whose novel was used as evidence at his trial for murder; walking with Kevin Shea, a firefighter who survived 9/11 but is still tormented by his inability to remember what he did on that day; and a ride-along with the sandhogs, subterranean construction workers who have been building water tunnels under the streets of New York for generations. Those are just a few of my personal favorites, but every story in this collections sheds light on something meaningful in an interesting way. The pieces are all brief, but deep.

The bottom line? This is an outstanding collection of non-fiction that will whet your appetite for more.

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David Grann

The devil and sherlock holmes.

The truth is always stranger than fiction, even when it comes to murder mysteries. That’s the take-home lesson of New Yorker writer David Grann’s latest collection, which brings together 12 stories of real-life mysteries, each one stranger and more gripping than the last. — The Daily Beast

No journalist working today spins a yarn quite like The New Yorker's David Grann.”

Whether he’s reporting on the infiltration of the murderous Aryan Brotherhood into the U.S. prison system, tracking down a chameleon con artist in Europe, or riding in a cyclone-tossed skiff with a scientist hunting the elusive giant squid, David Grann revels in telling stories that explore the nature of obsession and that peel back hidden, often dangerous realms. This breathtaking collection includes stories about the foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes who is found dead in mysterious circumstances, about an arson sleuth trying to prove that a man about to be executed is innocent, and about sandhogs racing to complete the brutally dangerous job of building New York City’s water tunnels before the old system collapses.

Throughout, Grann’s accounts display the full power—and often the perversity—of the human spirit. Compulsively readable, “The Devil and Sherlock Holmes” is a brilliant mosaic of ambition, madness, passion, and folly.

More praise for The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

In The Devil and Sherlock Holmes , these straightforward tales grip you as unrelentingly as the suckered appendages of the giant squid Grann attempts to track down in ‘‘The Squid Hunter.’’ You might feel that some of the pieces skirt credibility, but remember, as Holmes himself once said, ‘‘Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.’ — Keith Staskiewicz, Entertainment Weekly

The sign of a lasting work of nonfiction is that it’s still a gripping read years after its original publication has been consigned to the recycling bin. These pieces, without exception, meet that test. — Nancy Klingener, The Miami Herald

Grann’s new book is The Devil and Sherlock Holmes , a collection of—well, I want to call them short stories, or novellas, because they read like fiction, even though they are all non-fiction. — Bookotron

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes by David Grann

Many of the pieces in David Grann’s fine collection of articles, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes , read like detective stories, and it would be tempting to categorize this book, whose subtitle promises us “tales of murder, madness, and obsession,” as a work of true crime, albeit one without the breathless exaggerations of that genre. In his first book, the best-selling The Lost City of Z , the writer offered up a true tale of deadly obsession for the ages: the attempts to find a legendary city in the Amazon, and the explorers who vanished searching for it. If that earlier book possessed a certain Conradian energy, these essays, most of which were published in the New Yorker , display a more mournful style—there’s a melancholy undercurrent of horror here, a gift for locating and detailing the macabre. In “Trial by Fire,” a Texas man with a violent past loses his three young children in a ghastly house fire, and is then convicted and executed for their murder, despite growing evidence that he may very well be innocent, the victim of outdated and inaccurate fire investigation methods. In “The Chameleon,” a notorious French master of disguise poses as a long-lost American teen and is reunited with his “family” (really!), only to realize that some members of said family may have a very good idea what actually happened to the real missing kid. And in “True Crime,” a strange, wannabe Polish cult novelist is convicted of the gruesome murder of a businessman, thanks in part to the murder’s resemblance to incidents from his book.

Even when Grann steps away from tales involving actual deaths and accusations of murder, he’s drawn to the grim side of human experience, as in his riveting account of the generations of “sandhog” workers who spend their lives toiling in New York’s dangerous and dank underground City Tunnels, the vast system of waterways and pipelines that provide the city with the 1.3 billion gallons of water every day. A profile of Rickey Henderson, one of the most flamboyant baseball players of all time, turns out to be a sad look at his life in a bottom-of-the-barrel independent league at the age of forty-six, desperate to get back to the Majors. Even a story about an obsessive scientist hunting for the elusive giant squid, the stuff of elaborately produced Nature Channel documentaries, strikes a discordant tone: One of the main reasons the creature has never been caught alive is that it and its babies have a tendency to die right before anyone can capture them; the scientist’s journey ends in failure.

There’s a rectitude to Grann’s writing that serves him well when mapping out these sad tales. The Victorians seem to be his touchstone; quotes from Sherlock Holmes stories introduce the various sections of the book (and the essay “Mysterious Circumstances” investigates the death, probably a suicide, of a noted Holmes scholar). Balancing his unflinching eye for reportorial detail with an undercurrent of compassion, the writer stakes out a rare middle ground between observation and reflection. Describing two fire investigators exploring a home where three children have just died horrible deaths, he writes, “The men slowly toured the perimeter of the house, taking notes and photographs, like archeologists mapping out a ruin.” The words are precise, but there is humanity in the writing, and it’s all the more impressive that Grann manages to evoke it without drawing any attention to himself; his tales are first-person ones, but they don’t foreground the writer in that manner so popular among magazine editors today. Indeed, his selflessness as a writer, along with his gentle rectitude, cause him to bear a resemblance to another hero who never hogs the spotlight: Holmes’s assistant, Watson. Rarely does modesty produce such stunning results. Bilge Ebiri reviews and writes about film for New York magazine.

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Deception And 'The Devil And Sherlock Holmes'

Author David Grann has also been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003. Matt Richman hide caption

Author David Grann has also been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003.

David Grann spent years traveling around the world, documenting true stories of obsession, deception, and just plain mystery. He chronicles the stories he collected in his book, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes.

Grann's tales range from the suspicious death of an Arthur Conan Doyle scholar, Richard Lancelyn Green, to the story of an international impostor who somehow convinced an American family he was their missing son.

Tell us : Have you ever deliberately misrepresented yourself, or just let someone believe something about you that wasn't quite the whole truth? Host Neal Conan admits he used to claim Conan Doyle as a distant relative. What's your story?

Excerpt: 'The Devil And Sherlock Holmes'

Copyright © 2010 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Nonfiction review: 'The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession'

• Updated: Apr. 17, 2010, 4:00 p.m. |
• Published: Apr. 17, 2010, 3:00 p.m.
• Special to The Oregonian

"Everyone says I'm smart," Forrest Tucker acknowledged, after his arrest for robbing the Republic Security Bank in Jupiter, Fla. "But I'm not smart in the ways of life or I wouldn't have done the things I did."

Seventy-eight-years-old, and looking "as if he had just come from the Early Bird Special," Tucker had been one of the most notorious stickup men -- and escape artists -- of the 20th century. When he died, he sighed, no one would remember him. Sitting in a wheelchair in a prison medical center in Fort Worth, Texas, Tucker wished that he had had "a real profession, something like the music business."

David Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is drawn to men like Tucker, who exhibit human nature in all its power and perversity. In

he profiles a dozen of them, including Richard Lancelyn Green, the world's foremost -- and most obsessive -- expert on Sherlock Holmes, who died, mysteriously, while in hot pursuit of the missing papers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Parisian-born Frederic Pierre Bourdin, who assumed the identity of Nicholas Barclay, a missing 16-year-old boy from Texas; and Krystian Bala, a Polish intellectual whose novel, "Amok," a postmodern rendition of "Crime and Punishment," was a "road map" to a murder he himself had committed.

A gifted storyteller, Grann has a Sherlock Holmesian gift for unearthing facts that are hidden in plain sight, presenting a crystal-clear narrative and letting his compelling cast of characters speak for themselves. With good reason, he doesn't try too hard to explain the inexplicable by supplying answers to enduring age-old questions about why some people do good while others are evil. Recognizing his remorse for what it was, a show, he tells us, Bourdin married and had a child after he was released from prison. Had he become a new person? After a moment of silence, the chameleon replies, enigmatically, "No, this is who I am."

Easily worth the price of admission, a visit to Grann's rogue's gallery is likely to leave you with a sense, at once awful and awesome, of the profound desire we all have for recognition. Caught, convicted and imprisoned, Bala announces that a new edition of "Amok" is about to be released. And that he is hard at work on a new -- and "even more shocking" -- novel, titled "De Liryk," a pun on lyrics, as in a story, and delirium. When it's published, he implies, "the devil" will get his due.

-- Glenn C. Altschuler

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The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

A fascinating collection of investigative journalism about real-life mysteries, baffling crimes, and eclectic curiosities by the bestselling author of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon .

Many of the collection's best essays deal with criminal cases. The book's title comes from the piece "Mysterious Circumstances," where Grann investigates the suspicious death of one of the world's leading Sherlock Holmes scholars, while in "True Crime," a Polish police detective attempts to prove the guilt of a writer who included very specific details about a grisly killing in his novel. One of the most successful essays, and the most puzzling, is "The Chameleon," about a French con artist whose signature scam is impersonating teenage boys. However, when he attempts to pass himself off as a missing teen from rural Texas, he soon suspects that he may have conned himself into the wrong family.

Other essays in the collection cover a diverse range of topics: scientists who devote their lives to capturing the giant squid; Sandhogs, the urban miners responsible for New York City's underground infrastructure; the unlikely rise of the mob in Youngstown, Ohio; and the curiously long career of Baseball Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson.

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes is a terrific summer read, perfect for the plane, the beach, or the car (check out the e-audiobook , narrated by acclaimed voice actor Mark Deakins, too). Entirely engrossing with something for everyone - suspense, intrigue, curiosities and wonders.

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The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession by David Grann

Acclaimed New Yorker writer and author of the breakout debut bestseller The Lost City of Z, David Grann offers a collection of spellbinding narrative journalism. Whether he’s reporting on the infiltration of the murderous Aryan Brotherhood into the U.S. prison system, tracking down a chameleon con artist in Europe, or riding in a cyclone- tossed skiff with a scientist hunting the elusive giant squid, David Grann revels in telling stories that explore the nature of obsession and that piece together true and unforgettable mysteries. Each of the dozen stories in this collection reveals a hidden and often dangerous world and, like Into Thin Air and The Orchid Thief, pivots around the gravitational pull of obsession and the captivating personalities of those caught in its grip. There is the world’s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes who is found dead in mysterious circumstances; an arson sleuth trying to prove that a man about to be executed is innocent; and sandhogs racing to complete the brutally dangerous job of building New York City’s water tunnels before the old system collapses. Throughout, Grann’s hypnotic accounts display the power—and often the willful perversity—of the human spirit. Compulsively readable, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant mosaic of ambition, madness, passion, and folly.

I’m a big fan of Grann’s Lost City of Z (no, I haven’t seen the movie thankyouverymuch) so I was happy when this book came up in my To Read pile.

The book is a collection of previously released stories by Grann, most with updates. While some of them held my attention, white knuckled on the steering wheel, others were interesting but didn’t hold me. That said, Grann is a solid storyteller and there’s something for everyone in this collection. The title is a little misleading though. Be warned, there is only one story having to do with Holmes at all (the first one) so if you’re looking for investigative journalism about only Holmes or Doyle, this collection isn’t for you.

Frankly, truth is stranger than fiction and the scariest and most fascinating stories that Grann researched and reported on were ones that made me drive a touch slower on my commute home, hoping to finish the chapter by the time I got to my driveway. The Brand, a murderous prison sub culture in super max prisons; the vulnerability of the water tunnels and aqueducts under NYC; the mysterious suicide/murder of a Holmes scholar.

For some reason, lately I’ve been gearing more towards reading non-fiction and this was a good place to continue my journey. The stories were well done, all different and interesting, and reminded me of why I liked Grann’s Lost City of Z so much in the first place. His new book is out and I intend to grab the audiobook version of that one too.

Fans of non-fiction and true crime will devour.

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This sounds great! Thanks for the review.

This sounds like an interesting collection. Thanks for the review.

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I. Book introduction

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession (2010) is a collection of 12 essays by American journalist David Grann.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon —and one of the most gifted reporters and storytellers of his generation—comes a “gripping” ( The Miami Herald ), “hilarious” ( Entertainment Weekly ) collection of true crime mysteries about people whose obsessions propel them into unfathomable and often deadly circumstances.

Whether David Grann is investigating a mysterious murder, tracking a chameleon-like con artist, or hunting an elusive giant squid, he has proven to be a superb storyteller. In The Devil and Sherlock Holmes , Grann takes the reader around the world, revealing a gallery of rogues and heroes with their own particular fixations who show that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

Book Summary

Acclaimed New Yorker writer and author of the breakout debut bestseller The Lost City of Z, David Grann offers a collection of spellbinding narrative journalism.

Whether he’s reporting on the infiltration of the murderous Aryan Brotherhood into the U.S. prison system, tracking down a chameleon con artist in Europe, or riding in a cyclone- tossed skiff with a scientist hunting the elusive giant squid, David Grann revels in telling stories that explore the nature of obsession and that piece together true and unforgettable mysteries.

Each of the dozen stories in this collection reveals a hidden and often dangerous world and, like Into Thin Air and The Orchid Thief, pivots around the gravitational pull of obsession and the captivating personalities of those caught in its grip. There is the world’s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes who is found dead in mysterious circumstances; an arson sleuth trying to prove that a man about to be executed is innocent; and sandhogs racing to complete the brutally dangerous job of building New York City’s water tunnels before the old system collapses. Throughout, Grann’s hypnotic accounts display the power—and often the willful perversity—of the human spirit.

Compulsively readable, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant mosaic of ambition, madness, passion, and folly.

Editorial Reviews

• “Horrifying, hilarious, and outlandish. . . . These straightforward tales grip you as unrelentingly as the suckered appendages of the giant squid Grann attempts to track down in ‘The Squid Hunter.’”— Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A)
• “A gripping read. . . . Obsessives get themselves into some interesting places. Grann is the perfect guide to take you there.”— The Miami Herald
• “A dozen intricately crafted accounts. . . . Like the best of stories, each carries the spice of intrigue and the momentum of a search. . . . [They] will make your heart race and, at times, ache. They’re stories to share with friends, even if Grann can’t be there himself.”— Cleveland Plain Dealer
• “Grann’s obsession with how narratives are told is complex and compelling. . . . But it’s the basic stories themselves—bizarre and fascinating, bolstered by exhaustive research—that make the book so gripping.”— Time Out New York
• “Titillating. . . . Evidence of Grann’s abundant talent as a writer.”— Providence Journal
• “The most powerful essay I read this year was David Grann’s ‘Trial by Fire.’”— David Brooks, The New York Times
• “The truth is always stranger than fiction, even when it comes to murder mysteries. That’s the take-home lesson of Grann’s latest collection, which brings together 12 stories of real-life mysteries, each one stranger and more gripping than the last.”— The Daily Beast
• “A gifted storyteller, Grann has a Sherlock Holmesian gift for unearthing facts that are hidden in plain sight, presenting a crystal-clear narrative and letting his compelling cast of characters speak for themselves. . . . Easily worth the price of admission, a visit to Grann’s rogue’s gallery is likely to leave you with a sense, at once awful and awesome, of the profound desire we all have for recognition.”— The Oregonian
• “Beautifully constructed, highly improbably real life reports.”— GQ (UK)
• “Eclectic. . . . Haunting. . . . Skilfully crafted. . . . [Grann] does not just tell these bizarre tales, he meets, interviews, gets to know and seems to understand many of his strange subjects.”— The Irish Times
• “There is humanity in the writing, and it’s all the more impressive that Grann manages to evoke it without drawing any attention to himself; his tales are first-person ones, but they don’t foreground the writer in that manner so popular among magazine editors today. Indeed, his selflessness as a writer, along with his gentle rectitude, cause him to bear a resemblance to another hero who never hogs the spotlight: Holmes’s assistant, Watson. Rarely does modesty produce such stunning results.”— Bookforum
• “Thoroughly documented, well written and full of surprises.”— Toronto Star
• “Grann’s in-depth reporting and vivid writing make this worthwhile reading for lovers of good journalism.”— Booklist
• “Chilling. . . . Poignant. . . . Haunting and gripping. . . . Gets into worlds that are otherwise invisible to us.”— Daily Mail (London)
• “Grann is a worthy heir to Truman Capote.”— Le Monde (Paris)

About David Grann

David Elliot Grann (born March 10, 1967) is an American journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker , and a best-selling author.

His first book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon , was published by Doubleday in February 2009. After its first week of publication, it debuted on The New York Times bestseller list at #4 and later reached #1. Grann’s articles have been collected in several anthologies, including What We Saw: The Events of September 11, 2001, The Best American Crime Writing of 2004 and 2005, and The Best American Sports Writing of 2003 and 2006. He has written for The New York Times Magazine , The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard.

According to a profile in Slate, Grann has a reputation as a “workhorse reporter”, which has made him a popular journalist who “inspires a devotion in readers that can border on the obsessive.”

David Grann was born on March 10, 1967, to Phyllis and Victor Grann. His mother is the former CEO of Putnam Penguin and the first woman CEO of a major publishing firm. His father is an oncologist and Director of the Bennett Cancer Center in Stamford, Connecticut. Grann has two siblings, Edward and Alison

II. Reviewer: The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

1. NANCY O reviews for The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

Do not miss this one. Period.

The author of this book, David Grann, is the author of The Lost City of Z , one of my all-time favorite books. Grann isn’t a novelist, but rather he writes wonderful essays, and has been featured in the New Yorker. So you should assume immediately that this book isn’t going to be another Sherlock Holmes pastiche, because it’s not. Instead, it’s a book of essays, but don’t let that put you off. It is absolutely delightful.

Grann has this thing about people who are absolutely obsessed about what they do, a fact you already know if you’ve read his splendid The Lost City of Z . In this book, he takes his readers on a journey through a dozen different profiles, all completely true, all dealing with different types of obsessions. You have to admire his ingenuity in picking such different cases, yet having them all tie together so wonderfully.

Structured in three parts, all headed by quotations from various Sherlock Holmes stories, the first section is subtitled “Any Truth is Better Than Infinite Doubt.” Here’s the guy whose lifelong ambition was to write the ultimate and the definitive biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. After there was a dispute over some of Sir Arthur’s papers, the subject of this essay was found dead under some murky circumstances. Was it murder or suicide? Then there’s the incredibly sad and horrifying case of the Texas man who may or may not have set his own home on fire, killing his children, and who may have paid the ultimate price due to the zealousness of certain arson investigators. The third entry in this section is the odd story of a French man that reads along the lines of Tey’s Brat Farrar or even the movie “The Changeling,” leading into the strange account of a man who may or may not have been guilty of murder, based on a book he wrote. Finally, there’s the story of a firefighter who lost all memory of what happened to him on 9/11 as his unit went into the towers before they collapsed.

Part Two, entitled “A Strange Enigma is Man,” contains four stories: one about one man’s obsession with giant squids, one about the Sandhogs deep under the streets of New York City, one about a man whose life was spent as a criminal, and the fourth relating to why a championship baseball player won’t give up.

Part Three, “All that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe,” contains three essays. The first of these is about the Aryan Brotherhood and how it got its start, as well as its impact on prisons and law enforcement. The second focuses on Youngstown, Ohio, a city long under mob control. The final essay in this section (and in the book) stopped me cold. It focuses on a known Haitian political and death-squad leader who somehow ended up in New York as a real-estate agent. Even though the US government knew that this guy was an assassin, for “political” reasons, he’s still free here in our country. If this one doesn’t creep you out about the political system in our country, nothing will.

Grann is an absolutely fabulous writer and his essays will keep you interested up to the minute you turn the last page. His approach is different and definitely holds your attention, and the added bonus is that you get a chance to learn a lot about things you probably had no clue about otherwise. I can most highly recommend this book and this author.And as a sidebar, if you have not yet read his other book, run, do not walk, and go get it.

2. DIANE reviews for The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

This is a marvelous collection of David Grann’s reporting. The subtitle describes them as “tales of murder, madness and obsession,” and that’s as good a summary as any for the variety of pieces here.

My favorite stories in this book were about the suspicious death of a Sherlock Holmes fan; the life of a Frenchman nicknamed “The Chameleon” who was a serial imposter; the ordeal of a firefighter who was trying to reconstruct what happened to him on 9/11; the hunt for giant squid; the rise of the prison gang Aryan Brotherhood; the interview with a legendary bank robber; and the history behind a corrupt Congressman from Ohio and how the mafia ran his town.

These articles were originally published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other magazines, and they are engaging and insightful. I always appreciate it when a good writer is able to publish a collection of shorter pieces — they’re a great complement to their longer works. Highly recommended.

3. ASHLEY reviews for The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

The Devil & Sherlock Holmes is a collection of David Grann’s investigative journalism, covering a wide range of topics (though, as the subtitle of this book suggests, he is a bit fixated on stories of murder, madness and obsession, particularly the latter).

David Grann is very good at what he does, and this collection is proof of that. All the essays in this book have been previously published in newspapers and magazines, including the two essays that gave the inspiration for the mashed-up title (“Mysterious Circumstances: The Strange Death of a Sherlock Holmes Fanatic” and “Giving ‘The Devil’ His Due: The Death-Squad Real Estate Agent”).

The first two essays were by far my favorites. The one detailing the life and death of the Sherlock Holmes expert struck exactly the right balance of seriousness and mystery for me, and the second one, while equally as compelling, also made me angry (it’s an essay about a man who was most likely executed for killing his three children while proof of his innocence was available to those in power). The rest of the essays were just a bit of a letdown after that opening twofer, but until the last part of the book, I still enjoyed almost all of them.

The book is split into three parts, all preceded by a quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. The first part concerns mysteries to which we might never know the full answers; the second, stories about individuals who pursue things obsessively (a man who won’t give up his search of the first live giant squid, another who can’t stop robbing banks, another a family of men who have all worked on the underground city of tunnels that supply NYC’s water, and perhaps the most notable, one about an infamous conman who won’t stop impersonating teenagers, etc.). The final section detailed stories of corruption and organized crime. The last section was by far my least favorite, and I kind of wish I would have skipped it. (Of note: All the essays in this section–one about the Aryan Brotherhood, another about the mafia in Youngstown, and the last detailing the exploits of a Haitian war criminal–were thoroughly written and researched, but I found them mostly very unpleasant to read due to my own personal tastes about the subject matter. I much prefer Grann writing about more humane topics.)

Overall, I’m glad I finally picked this up. I’ve liked Grann’s writing since I read The Lost City of Z , and I’ve been meaning to read this book for years now, just never got around to it. Very much looking forward to his second book-length investigation that was recently published.

4. E.BAXTER reviews for The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

Truths stranger than fiction

I read Grann’s Lost City of Z some time ago and enjoyed it very much so when I saw this one was available I had to pick it up as well. The book is divided into 12 stand-alone stories which delve into the stranger side of life. Grann does a great job of drawing in the reader and building suspense into the telling. While this collection is widely varying in subject matter, the stories held my attention very well. Grann explores intriguing sides of human nature. A leading Sherlock Holmes expert’s death is a case worthy of the master detective himself, an eccentric giant squid hunter plumbs the depths looking for the elusive creative, a human chameleon becomes whoever he wants, even fooling family members. The main characters display a fascinating single-mindedness that one will both admire and loathe.

Each of the stories has a sad tenor so I wouldn’t go into this one expecting a pick-me-up human interest story.

Each also gives the sense that the events are taking place in a world or situation all their own which outsiders would never have a glimpse of without someone like Grann who proves adept at getting the principle players to confide their secrets.

I agree with several of the reviewers that the last couple of stories were not on the same level as those earlier in the book, although the final story bucked that trend. However, even the later stories were much more interesting than most real life stories I come across.

I would recommend this book for anyone looking to explore some areas they never knew existed.

5. TONI reviews for The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

Picked this up after reading a fabulous New Yorker story (about murder and political intrigue in Guatemala) by David Grann. Was curious to see what else he had written — as it turns out, that would be basically ALL of my favorite New Yorker stories over the last decade, or since whenever I started subscribing. I blame the infrequency of his byline for my lack of name recognition — but sure enough, as I made my way through I recognized one after another story, each of which I remember falling hard for when they were first published. There’s the one about the postmodern serial killer in Poland (which I think I rather annoyingly emailed to about 50 people with the subject line “you must read this”), the one about the French change-up artist who goes around posing as children, the one about what all evidence points to as being the execution of an innocent man in Texas. Basically, this man has a knack for finding, and telling, an incredible story. I think if I were a journalist, reading this book would fill me with despair. Even though I’m not, it made me kinda wish I could BE David Grann, doing whatever it is he does to find these stories.

6. IAN reviews for The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

On more than one occasion, I have feared for this journalist’s life while reading his New Yorker stories. No, he doesn’t risk life and limb reporting from battlefields overseas. Rather, he files his reports from pretty much anywhere and everywhere, shining light over obsessive and sometimes very, very odd human behaviors. This is a collection of his work over the last some odd years mostly for the New Yorker. The subjects of his stories, as best I can put it, have leapt over some kind of metaphorical precipice inside their minds and are in mid-fall, potentially toward their very, real doom. They include a Sherlock Holmes fanatic (and his suspicious death/possible murder), a fully grown man who makes a habit of impersonating teenagers, a novelist who writes a book with the details of a terrible crime he may or may not have committed, and an old man who can’t give up a life of crime even into his eighties.

7. KIM reviews for The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

An eclectic collection of essays written by David Grann I wasn’t sure what I was in for. I’ve never heard of the author before but the blurb was interesting and the book was cheap.

The first essay about the death of Sherlock Holmes expert Richard Lancelyn Green was, I felt, a poor choice of opening work. I realise it was chosen to link with the Holmes aspect but it was a confusing, disjointed article and if the rest of the book was in that vein I would not have completed it.

From there though the quality increased and I found myself much more interested in the stories, particularly the essays about convicted chameleon Frédéric Bourdin, giant squid hunter Steve O’Shea and geriatric bank robber Forrest Tucker.

As a non-American the story about baseballer Rickey Henderson was probably the least interesting but was still ok.

A decent book it was good for a cheap read.

8. EJ reviews for The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

Fascinating stories

I usually do not read collections of essays or short stories because they are rarely equivalent in quality, which I find frustrating. However, this book bucks that trend in that the vast majority of the stories are fantastic, though the last two stories were the unquestionably the weakest.

Author David Grann is a writer for The New Yorker, and some of the essays in the book have been published elsewhere. However, I had not previously read any of them. Grann covers many subjects, from the mysterious death of a Sherlock Holmes fan/hobbyist to a fireman who was at Ground Zero on 9/11 but cannot remember at all how he survived, while the rest of his group died on that tragic day. Grann’s gift for storytelling is truly sublime. Each of the stories captivated me from the first page…at least until I got to the last two stories. For some reason the final chapters did not quite hold up to the rest of the collection.

The weak ending should not deter interested readers from picking up a copy of the book. I learned a great deal about a wide variety of subjects. Again, the writing was fantastic and the quality of the stories was even until the final two installments. Four stars for a book that was largely excellent.

9. MARY MCCOY reviews for The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

An edge-of-the-seat collection of investigative journalism that combines crime pieces (the Mafia-like rise of the Aryan Brotherhood in the federal prison system) and subjects that simply present puzzling questions (What’s up with the giant squid? Or New York City’s water supply? Or Rickey Henderson?).

Standouts in the book include the title piece about the suspicious death of one of the world’s leading Holmes scholars, shortly after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s papers were put up for auction; “True Crime,” the story of a Polish police detective trying to prove that an author included highly personal details about a grisly killing in his novel; and “Giving ‘The Devil’ His Due,” about Haitian war criminal Toto Constant, who fled to the U.S. after President Aristide was reinstated, and seemingly sheltered by the CIA, despite leading death squads.

The best essay, and the most curious, is “The Chameleon,” about a French con artist who specializes in impersonating teenage boys. In one of his cons, he pretends to be a teenage boy from Texas who was reported missing. Despite bearing only a slight resemblance to the missing boy, having a European accent, and spinning a wildly implausible story about being a victim of international sex trafficking, the Texas family welcomes him back with few questions and not much enthusiasm. After a few months, the con artist begins to realize he’s just conned himself into the wrong family.

All of these pieces were previously published elsewhere (mostly in the New Yorker); however, if you haven’t seen them before, this collection is diverse, fascinating, and definitely worth checking out.

10. LORI reviews for The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

I was very impressed with Grann’s writing in Killers of the Flower Moon, how he told a complicated story in such an organized and compelling way. So I decided to read this, which is a collection of magazine articles, most from The New Yorker. As with some essay books I skipped a few that didn’t hold my attention. The ones I read were great. The first one features Sherlock Holmes fanatics belonging to international rival clubs, some insisting Sherlock only be referred to as a real person, devotion till its bonkers, and the essay focuses on one man, prominent in that world, who died in a locked-room mystery.

Five stars for that one. And for the one about the 9/11 first responder who doesn’t remember his actions that morning and tries to piece together how he ended up where he did; the true crime tale about a psycho killer in Poland; the scientist obsessed with finding a live giant squid and the heartbreaking one “Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?” Also the one about prison gangs — which if you had told me I’d be utterly absorbed reading about prison gangs I would have said hah, no. But yes, and it’s because Grann is an excellent storyteller.

III. The Devil and Sherlock Holmes Quotes

The best book quotes from The Devil and Sherlock Holmes by David Grann

“The course of human events is not permanently altered by the great deeds of history, nor by the great men but by the small daily doings of the little men.” “Washington Bridge. The components were then lowered into the Thirtieth Street hole by a special crane that could withstand”

Excerpted from The Devil and Sherlock Holmes by David Grann

Part one – mysterious circumstances.

Richard Lancelyn Green, the world’s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes, believed that he had finally solved the case of the missing papers. Over the past two decades, he had been looking for a trove of letters, diary entries, and manuscripts written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes. The archive was estimated to be worth nearly four million dollars, and was said by some to carry a deadly curse, like the one in the most famous Holmes story, “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

The papers had disappeared after Conan Doyle died, in 1930, and without them no one had been able to write a definitive biography—a task that Green was determined to complete. Many scholars feared that the archive had been discarded or destroyed; as the London Times noted, its whereabouts had become “a mystery as tantalizing as any to unfold at 221B Baker Street,” the fictional den of Holmes and his fellow-sleuth, Dr. Watson.

Not long after Green launched his investigation, he discovered that one of Conan Doyle’s five children, Adrian, had, with the other heirs’ agreement, stashed the papers in a locked room of a château that he owned in Switzerland. Green then learned that Adrian had spirited some of the papers out of the château without his siblings’ knowledge, hoping to sell them to collectors. In the midst of this scheme, he died of a heart attack—giving rise to the legend of the curse. After Adrian’s death, the papers apparently vanished. And whenever Green tried to probe further he found himself caught in an impenetrable web of heirs—including a self-styled Russian princess—who seemed to have deceived and double-crossed one another in their efforts to control the archive.

For years, Green continued to sort through evidence and interview relatives, until one day the muddled trail led to London—and the doorstep of Jean Conan Doyle, the youngest of the author’s children. Tall and elegant, with silver hair, she was an imposing woman in her late sixties. (“Something very strong and forceful seems to be at the back of that wee body,” her father had written of Jean when she was five. “Her will is tremendous.”) Whereas her brother Adrian had been kicked out of the British Navy for insubordination, and her elder brother Denis was a playboy who had sat out the Second World War in America, she had become an officer in the Royal Air Force, and was honored, in 1963, as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

She invited Green into her flat, where a portrait of her father, with his walrus mustache, hung near the fireplace. Green had almost as great an interest in her father as she did, and she began sharing her memories, as well as family photographs. She asked him to return, and one day, Green later told friends, she showed him some boxes that had been stored in a London solicitor’s office. Peering inside them, he said, he had glimpsed part of the archive. Dame Jean informed him that, because of an ongoing family dispute, she couldn’t yet allow him to read the papers, but she said that she intended to bequeath nearly all of them to the British Library, so that scholars could finally examine them. After she died, in 1997, Green eagerly awaited their transfer—but nothing happened.

Then, in March, 2004, Green opened the London Sunday Times and was shocked to read that the lost archive had “turned up” at Christie’s auction house and was to be sold, in May, for millions of dollars by three of Conan Doyle’s distant relatives; instead of going to the British Library, the contents would be scattered among private collectors around the world, who might keep them inaccessible to scholars. Green was sure that a mistake had been made, and hurried to Christie’s to inspect the materials. Upon his return, he told friends that he was certain that many of the papers were the same as those he had uncovered. What’s more, he alleged, they had been stolen—and he had proof.

Over the next few days, he approached members of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, one of hundreds of fan clubs devoted to the detective. (Green had once been chairman.) He alerted other so-called Sherlockians, including various American members of the Baker Street Irregulars, an invitation-only group that was founded in 1934 and named after the street urchins Holmes regularly employed to ferret out information. Green also contacted the more orthodox scholars of Conan Doyle, or Doyleans, about the sale. (Unlike Green, who moved between the two camps, many Doyleans distanced themselves from the Sherlockians, who often treated Holmes as if he were a real detective and refused to mention Conan Doyle by name.)

Green shared with these scholars what he knew about the archive’s provenance, revealing what he considered the most damning piece of evidence: a copy of Dame Jean’s will, which stated, “I give to The British Library all . . . my late father’s original papers, personal manuscripts, diaries, engagement books, and writings.” Determined to block the auction, the makeshift group of amateur sleuths presented its case to Members of Parliament. Toward the end of the month, as the group’s campaign intensified and its objections appeared in the press, Green hinted to his sister, Priscilla West, that someone was threatening him. Later, he sent her a cryptic note containing three phone numbers and the message “please keep these numbers safe.” He also called a reporter from the London Times, warning that “something” might happen to him.

On the night of Friday, March 26th, he had dinner with a longtime friend, Lawrence Keen, who later said that Green had confided in him that “an American was trying to bring him down.” After the two men left the restaurant, Green told Keen that they were being followed, and pointed to a car behind them.

The same evening, Priscilla West phoned her brother, and got his answering machine. She called repeatedly the next morning, but he still didn’t pick up. Alarmed, she went to his house and knocked on the door; there was no response. After several more attempts, she called the police, who came and broke open the entrance. Downstairs, the police found the body of Green lying on his bed, surrounded by Sherlock Holmes books and posters, with a cord wrapped around his neck. He had been garroted.

“I will lay out the whole case for you,” John Gibson, one of Green’s closest friends, told me when I phoned him shortly after learning of Green’s death. Gibson had written several books with Green, including “My Evening with Sherlock Holmes,” a 1981 collection of parodies and pastiches of the detective stories. With a slight stammer, Gibson said of his friend’s death, “It’s a complete and utter mystery.”

Not long after, I travelled to Great Bookham, a village thirty miles south of London, where Gibson lives. He was waiting for me when I stepped off the train. He was tall and rail-thin, and everything about him—narrow shoulders, long face, unruly gray hair—seemed to slouch forward, as if he were supported by an invisible cane. “I have a file for you,” he said, as we drove off in his car. “As you’ll see, there are plenty of clues and not a lot of answers.”

He sped through town, past a twelfth-century stone church and a row of cottages, until he stopped at a red brick house surrounded by hedges. “You don’t mind dogs, I hope,” he said. “I’ve two cocker spaniels. I only wanted one but the person I got them from said that they were inseparable, and so I took them both and they’ve been fighting ever since.”

When he opened the front door, both spaniels leaped on us, then at each other. They trailed us into the living room, which was filled with piles of antique books, some reaching to the ceiling. Among the stacks was a near-complete set of The Strand Magazine, in which the Holmes stories were serialized at the turn of the twentieth century; a single issue, which used to sell for half a shilling, is now worth as much as five hundred dollars. “Altogether, there must be about sixty thousand books,” Gibson said.

We sat on a couch and he opened his case file, carefully spreading the pages around him. “All right, dogs. Don’t disturb us,” he said. He looked up at me. “Now I’ll tell you the whole story.”

Gibson said that he had attended the coroner’s inquest and taken careful notes, and as he spoke he picked up a magnifying glass beside him and peered through it at several crumpled pieces of paper. “I write everything on scraps,” he said. The police, he said, had found only a few unusual things at the scene. There was the cord around Green’s neck—a black shoelace. There was a wooden spoon near his hand, and several stuffed animals on the bed. And there was a partially empty bottle of gin.

The police found no sign of forced entry and assumed that Green had committed suicide. Yet there was no note, and Sir Colin Berry, the president of the British Academy of Forensic Sciences, testified to the coroner that, in his thirty-year career, he had seen only one suicide by garroting. “One,” Gibson repeated. Self-garroting is extremely difficult to do, he explained; people who attempt it typically pass out before they are asphyxiated. Moreover, in this instance, the cord was not a thick rope but a shoelace, making the feat even more unlikely.

Gibson reached into his file and handed me a sheet of paper with numbers on it. “Take a look,” he said. “My phone records.” The records showed that he and Green had spoken repeatedly during the week before his death; if the police had bothered to obtain Green’s records, Gibson went on, they would no doubt show that Green had called him only hours before he died. “I was probably the last person to speak to him,” he said. The police, however, had never questioned him.

During one of their last conversations about the auction, Gibson recalled, Green had said he was afraid of something.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Gibson told him.

“No, I’m worried,” Green said.

“What? You fear for your life?”

Gibson said that, at the time, he didn’t take the threat seriously but advised Green not to answer his door unless he was sure who it was.

Gibson glanced at his notes. There was something else, he said, something critical. On the eve of his death, he reminded me, Green had spoken to his friend Keen about an “American” who was trying to ruin him. The following day, Gibson said, he had called Green’s house and heard a strange greeting on the answering machine. “Instead of getting Richard’s voice in this sort of Oxford accent, which had been on the machine for a decade,” Gibson recalled, “I got an American voice that said, ‘Sorry, not available.’ I said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ I thought I must’ve dialled the wrong number. So I dialled really slowly again. I got the American voice. I said, ‘Christ almighty.’ ”

Gibson said that Green’s sister had heard the same recorded greeting, which was one reason that she had rushed to his house. Reaching into his file, Gibson handed me several more documents. “Make sure you keep them in chronological order,” he said. There was a copy of Jean Conan Doyle’s will, several newspaper clippings on the auction, an obituary, and a Christie’s catalogue.

That was pretty much all he had. The police, Gibson said, had not conducted any forensic tests or looked for fingerprints. And the coroner—who had once attended a meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society to conduct a mock inquest of the murder from a Conan Doyle story in which a corpse is discovered in a locked room—found himself stymied. Gibson said that the coroner had noted that there was not enough evidence to ascertain what had happened, and, as a result, the official verdict regarding whether Green had killed himself or been murdered was left open.

Within hours of Green’s death, Sherlockians seized upon the mystery, as if it were another case in the canon. In a Web chat room, one person, who called himself “inspector,” wrote, “As for self-garroting, it is like trying to choke oneself to death by your own hands.” Others invoked the “curse,” as if only the supernatural could explain it. Gibson handed me an article from a British tabloid that was headlined “ ‘curse of conan doyle’ strikes holmes expert.”

“So what do you think?” Gibson asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

Later, we went through the evidence again. I asked Gibson if he knew whose phone numbers were on the note that Green had sent to his sister.

Gibson shook his head. “It hadn’t come up at the inquest,” he said.

“What about the American voice on the answering machine?” I asked. “Do we know who that is?”

“Unfortunately, not a clue. To me that’s the strangest and most telling piece of evidence. Did Richard put that on his machine? What was he trying to tell us? Did the murderer put it there? And, if so, why would he do that?”

I asked if Green had ever displayed any irrational behavior. “No, never,” he said. “He was the most levelheaded man I ever met.”

He noted that Priscilla West had testified at the inquest that her brother had no history of depression. Indeed, Green’s physician wrote to the court to say that he had not treated Green for any illnesses for a decade.

“One last question,” I said. “Was anything taken out of the apartment?”

“Not that we know of. Richard had a valuable collection of Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle books, and nothing appears to be missing.”

As Gibson drove me back to the train station, he said, “Please, you must stay on the case. The police seem to have let poor Richard down.” Then he advised, “As Sherlock Holmes says, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

Some facts about Richard Green are easy to discern—those which illuminate the circumstances of his life, rather than the circumstances of his death. He was born on July 10, 1953; he was the youngest of three children; his father was Roger Lancelyn Green, a best-selling children’s author who popularized the Homeric myths and the legend of King Arthur, and who was a close friend of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien; and Richard was raised near Liverpool, on land that had been given to his ancestors in 1093, and where his family had resided ever since.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was the American consul in Liverpool in the eighteen-fifties, visited the house one summer, and he later described it in his “English Notebooks”:

We passed through a considerable extent of private road, and finally drove through a lawn, shaded with trees, and closely shaven, and reached the door of Poulton Hall. Part of the mansion is three or four hundred years old. . . . There is [a] curious, old, stately staircase, with a twisted balustrade, much like that of the old Province House in Boston. The drawing-room looks like a very handsome modern room, being beautifully painted, gilded, and paper-hung, with a white-marble fire- place, and rich furniture; so that the impression is that of newness, not of age.

By the time Richard was born, however, the Green family was, as one relative told me, “very English—a big house and no money.” The curtains were thin, the carpets were threadbare, and a cold draft often swirled through the corridors.

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The White Darkness by David Grann

The White Darkness is the fourth non-fiction book by American journalist David Grann. The book centers on the expeditions and adventures by British explorer and British Army officer Henry Worsley who traveled to the gravesite of Ernest Shackleton, a polar explorer himself. To reach the grave, Worsley traveled to the far shores of South Georgia Island in the southern Atlantic Ocean. In the following years, he traveled even farther.

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The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession Paperback – 3 Mar. 2011

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• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster UK
• Publication date 3 Mar. 2011
• Dimensions 13 x 2.2 x 19.8 cm
• ISBN-10 1849830665
• ISBN-13 978-1849830669
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"Horrifying, hilarious, and outlandish. . . . These straightforward tales grip you as unrelentingly as the suckered appendages of the giant squid Grann attempts to track down in 'The Squid Hunter.'" --"Entertainment Weekly "(Grade: A) "A gripping read. . . . Obsessives get themselves into some interesting places. Grann is the perfect guide to take you there." --"The Miami Herald" "A dozen intricately crafted accounts. . . . Like the best of stories, each carries the spice of intrigue and the momentum of a search. . . . [They] will make your heart race and, at times, ache. They're stories to share with friends, even if Grann can't be there himself." --"Cleveland Plain Dealer" "Grann's obsession with how narratives are told is complex and compelling. . . . But it's the basic stories themselves--bizarre and fascinating, bolstered by exhaustive research--that make the book so gripping." --"Time Out New York" "Titillating. . . . Evidence of Grann'

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster UK (3 Mar. 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1849830665
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1849830669
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13 x 2.2 x 19.8 cm
• 1,085 in World History (Books)

About the author

David grann.

DAVID GRANN is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He is the author of the critically acclaimed books "The Wager," "The Lost City of Z," and "Killers of the Flower Moon," which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the author of "The White Darkness" and the collection "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession." His book "Killers of the Flower Moon" was recently adapted into a film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, and Robert De Niro. Several of his other stories, including "The Lost City of Z" and "Old Man and the Gun," have also been adapted into major motion pictures. His investigative reporting and storytelling have garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award and an Edgar Allan Poe Award.

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The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession Paperback – Jan. 11 2011

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• Print length 404 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (Jan. 11 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 404 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307275906
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307275905
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 308 g
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• #144 in U.S. Fiction Anthologies
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About the author

David grann.

DAVID GRANN is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He is the author of the critically acclaimed books "The Wager," "The Lost City of Z," and "Killers of the Flower Moon," which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the author of "The White Darkness" and the collection "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession." His book "Killers of the Flower Moon" was recently adapted into a film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, and Robert De Niro. Several of his other stories, including "The Lost City of Z" and "Old Man and the Gun," have also been adapted into major motion pictures. His investigative reporting and storytelling have garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award and an Edgar Allan Poe Award.

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Moriarty's Winter: The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes

C. thorne , l. thorne  ( illustrator ).

46 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 9, 2024

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‘Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One’ review: a delightful detective adventure

Flawed but enticing

Q uietly in the background for many, Frogwares has been developing a string of Sherlock Holmes games over the years. Always a little clunky, always never quite hitting the spot, but still solidly fun, we’re up to the ninth instalment now in the form of Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One . A prequel to the others, it’s larger than the others and pursues a different path, following the origin story of Holmes as a nosy 21 year old exploring the Mediterranean island of Cordona. Again, it doesn’t quite hit the spot at times but for sleuthing fans, it remains a tempting tale.

• READ MORE: Exclusive: ‘Undetected’ is a love letter to ‘Metal Gear Solid’

Holmes might be young, but he’s still just as obnoxiously sharp as ever. This time around, he’s assisted by his childhood friend, Jon, rather than Watson. As you’ll soon discover, Jon isn’t actually real. An imaginary friend, he chips in with occasional advice if you talk to him and tends to offer some cheeky comments too. Given much of the game also focuses on Holmes piecing together his mother’s death from years ago, there’s quite a lot of Troubled Holmes afoot here.

Action is similar to other Sherlock Holmes games, with a hefty dose of how things were done in Frogwares’s most recent game, The Sinking City . Previous Sherlock Holmes games were fairly tightly woven. You’d always be automatically moved between locations not being able to take in London truly. Chapter One changes that by allowing you to roam Cordona quite freely. It’s down to you to figure out many of the clues to know where to go next. That’s both good and bad. You feel like a ‘real’ detective figuring out what you should do next compared to previous games guiding you a bit more obviously.

On the other hand, it can be tricky at times to know where to go next. Still, it’s frequently satisfying to chip away at things and come to your own conclusion. As a side note – exploring Cordona is reminiscent of an older Assassin’s Creed game. The urge to be able to climb rooftops lingers even though it’s completely impossible.

Once you do reach a location (not by climbing unfortunately), there’s often plenty to do. Witnesses need to be interviewed, bodies inspected, clues to be spotted, and a fair few puzzles too. Interviewing witnesses is rarely varied although there are some basic ways to spot things about them much like in earlier Sherlock Holmes games.

Instead, detecting clues is where it’s at. It’s possible to use a concentration ability to see a bit more of what’s going on, piecing together what may have occurred earlier. One case has you dealing with a man trampled to death by his pet elephant and you initially have to piece together the timeline before spotting that someone else was there at the time too, thrown against a shed by the creature.

Another part of the case has you rearranging statues at an archaeological dig site to detect where a tomb is located. As you detect clues, you’ll use Holmes’ powers of deduction to piece together what may have occurred, often being able to either condemn someone or dig deeper to see if the obvious solution isn’t actually the correct one.

It’s reasonably varied stuff that pieces together some unusual elements that still work well together. While the likes of Frogwares’s Crimes & Punishments and The Devil’s Daughter had some tightly woven cases, Chapter One expands upon this and makes things feel more far reaching and varied. Things are never as straightforward here as they were before (or should we say later as this is a prequel) for Holmes.

At times, you need to change clothes or your appearance to fit into wherever you’re trying to visit such as a yacht club, or to simply jog an old woman’s memory. Again, a feature that we’ve seen before in the series but one that is implemented more so thanks to the the open-world approach that means everyone reacts to you differently. A small but entertaining touch.

You’re constantly also trying to learn more about your mother’s past. Gathering documents, talking to people, and piecing together past events that may not be quite as Holmes remembers them. It adds to the longevity of the game while also giving you some extra mystery to solve. This is far from a short game which is refreshing to see.

It’s clunky, of course. Never forget it’s clunky. The controls work but never quite gel in a fluid manner. Looking at a body or investigation area involves moving your cursor around the screen to detect anything special and it’s so clearly designed for a PC as it doesn’t quite connect as well on a console. However, these are all things that afflicted other games and, honestly, it’s far from a dealbreaker.

Where things are a bit more irritating is when it comes to the introduction of combat. At times, you’ll need to fight it out to arrest criminals. You can throw snuff at enemies to confuse them as well as target where you shoot them but this really isn’t a game about combat and it’s far from fun. So, it’s worth switching off combat – something that fortunately is an option under the game’s settings. Instead, the mystery side of Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is where it prospers most.

Essentially, it’s a game you chip away at. I frequently found if I got stuck on a sequence that a short break away (sometimes just by wandering Cordona) would help me figure things out. Browsing through the many documents you collect or reacquainting yourself with the clues you’ve gleaned often helped. That’s where Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One feels at its strongest too. Each Eureka moment instantly making you feel good about yourself.

Is it a game for everyone? Far from it. It’s a slow burner. While it’s the best looking Sherlock Holmes game yet (as expected on the Xbox One Series X ), that doesn’t mean it’s going to entice everyone with its looks. Its origins are still squarely that PC game you stumble upon and find surprisingly beguiling. Instead, its storytelling and mystery solving is what’s most fun. It’s a Sunday afternoon game – albeit numerous Sunday afternoons, given it’s pretty lengthy compared to its predecessors.

Frogwares may have yet to throw off its mildly clunky shackles, but fans of solid mystery solving will still enjoy what’s on offer here.

Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is out on November 16 for PC , PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions to follow. We reviewed the game on Xbox Series X .

The Verdict

If you’re keen to test your cerebral matter then Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One will delight frequently. Occasionally clunky it may be, it’s still hugely satisfying and offers some compelling cases to solve. There’s some work to be done to make this the definitive Sherlock Holmes game but for now, revel in its wonders.

• Intriguing storytelling
• Satisfying exploration
• Captures Holmes’ essence well
• Occasional filler content
• Combat isn’t really needed
• Related Topics
• PlayStation 5
• Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One
• Video Game Culture
• Xbox Series X|S

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Sherlock Holmes The Devil'S Daughter Mayan Calendar

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Sherlock Holmes The Devil'S Daughter Mayan Calendar . To solve the mayan calendar puzzle in sherlock holmes: The devil's daughter [ official site] is like a fever dream, but a fever dream that's been really badly made.

The latest entry in the series, sherlock holmes: Mayan glyph puzzle is in case 2:

The Devil’s Daughter, Takes This Unusual Premise And Applies It To Five New Sherlockian Tales Of Intrigue, Suspense,.

Speak with him for a moment to get his card, then follow him to grub street via fast travel.

Sherlock Is Far Too Rugged And Handsome, And Watson Doesn’t Feel Like The Same Person Without His Bowler Hat And Moustache.

Examine the mayan calendar closely,.

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Images references :, use the ladder and walk to the other side, get down and walk to the other side..

Sherlock goes to scotland yard to analyze the belongings of zacharia.

The Puzzle Involves Deciphering Mayan Hieroglyphics And.

All discussions screenshots artwork broadcasts videos news guides reviews sherlock holmes:

To Solve The Mayan Calendar Puzzle In Sherlock Holmes:

13 episodes

This final volume of detective stories was Doyle’s effort to put his most famous creation behind him at long last. It includes a variety of tales, from widely separated periods in the protagonist’s life, including his retirement, stories told from various points of view: Watson’s, Holmes’s, and an omniscient narrator’s. Most, of course, illustrate the detective’s famous “deduction,” but not all; some of his successes call upon resources of character which we rarely associate with him. He demonstrates compassion and empathy, and more than once he laughs. His attitude toward Dr. Watson, although occasionally brusque, includes kindness, affection, and professional respect, revealing a deep and complex friendship that endears both men to the reader. (Summary by T. A. Copeland).

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle joseph

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• MAR 9, 2023

The Adventure of the Illustrious Client

The adventure of the blanched soldier, the adventure of the mazarin stone, the adventure of the three gables, the adventure of the sussex vampire, the adventure of the three garridebs.

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Revealed: the next Sherlock Holmes author, with a twist in the tale

The thriller writer Gareth Rubin focuses on Professor Moriarty, the great detective’s nemesis, in a new adventure approved by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s family

The biggest thorn in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s side was the world’s obstinate obsession with just one of his creations: Sherlock Holmes. And now, 94 years after the author’s death, the story is much the same: the deerstalker hat and pipe remain the internationally recognised emblems of the greatest detective who never lived. The boxing gear of Rodney Stone, his other adventuring hero? Or the bushy beard of The Lost World explorer Professor George Challenger? Not so much.

But Conan Doyle’s descendants have a longterm plan to correct this imbalance, and the Observer can reveal their latest weapon. Thriller writer Gareth Rubin is bringing out a new, officially approved Holmes story that will give equal billing to arch-villain Professor James Moriarty. The new novel unites the detecting skills of the talented sleuth with those of his greatest adversary, a criminal mastermind who runs an unseen network of thieves, murderers and blackmailers and yet never leaves a trace to link him to the scene.

“One of our aims is to get the world to know more about other Conan Doyle characters. And not just Moriarty, but those in other Holmes mysteries, like Colonel Sebastian Moran, or in other adventure series, like the Professor Challenger stories,” said Richard Pooley, Conan Doyle’s step-great-grandson and the man who runs the literary estate alongside Doyle’s great-nephew, Richard Doyle, and his great-niece, Catherine Bates. The family have endorsed Rubin’s book, Holmes and Moriarty , as a worthy successor. “Gareth has drawn these characters very well, including Colonel Moran, who is key to this story,” added Pooley. “Moran was once described by Holmes as ‘the second most dangerous man in London’, and he tells half of this new mystery. As Moriarty’s right-hand man, he only crops up in a couple of original Holmes stories, I believe.”

Efforts to spin out fresh entertainment from an established piece of work have become crucial to profitably managing a literary property. Earlier this month, the Roald Dahl Estate announced new books about his most popular characters, each penned by different authors, including Greg James, Konnie Huq and Adam Kay.

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In the same way, the owners of Agatha Christie’s back catalogue, a company now run by her great-grandson James Prichard, have looked to relaunch her vast output of work in new ways. Mystery writer Sophie Hannah has been in charge of revitalising Hercule Poirot in print, while on television the screenwriter Sarah Phelps added some edgy terror to Christie’s screen adaptations, and Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre gave an equally controversial, anti-colonial rendering of Murder is Easy last Christmas.

The idea of forging a link between Holmes and Rubin, a Londoner who works at the Observer and is best known for his recent bestseller The Turnglass , came from Rubin’s agent, Jon Wood. More than a decade ago, it was Wood who suggested that Anthony Horowitz should write earlier authorised Holmes titles, The House of Silk , in 2011, and its 2014 follow-up. Since these books, only film and theatre scripts about Holmes have been officially sanctioned by the family as sequels.

“Gareth has really developed the personas and is so good at dialogue,” said Pooley, who suspects that Moran, “a young guy”, could now spawn his own series. But there is potential too, he believes, in Professor Challenger, as well as in the boxer, Stone.

Also significant in the Holmes mythology, of course, are Sherlock’s reclusive brother Mycroft and the villainous Irene Adler, the only opponent to get the better of Holmes and one subsequently always referred to as “the woman”.

“We’re already talking to people who want to take Irene on to develop a television series. Most of Conan Doyle’s recurring characters were men, although the stories are often about women in peril. All that comes from his character. The most important people in his life were his mother and his second wife,” said Pooley. “His own father was useless and an alcoholic, and so all his tales are about chivalry. Sherlock and Dr Watson are always saving women.”

• Arthur Conan Doyle
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