In 1915, at the height of his career, Sherlock Holmes wrote his Memoirs and deposited the manuscript for safekeeping at the British Museum. Released by the Museum sixty years later, the manuscript has now been edited by the world’s leading authority on Holmes. To Dr Watson, Sherlock Holmes was the best and wisest man that Watson had ever known. But what was he really like—this man of modest birth who made himself the most famous private detective of all time, trusted agent, friend and confidant of the Great?

Here is the great sleuth’s own fearless analysis of his complex nature: his drug-taking; his ambitions; his reasons for not marrying; and his passion for the One Woman who would always be beyond his reach. The Memoirs are full of surprises even for confirmed Holmesians, revealing aspects of Holmes’s life that neither Dr Watson nor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were aware of. For instance, they show that the most powerful influence in shaping Homes’s career, by finding him illustrious clients, was the American financier William H. Vanderbilt.

But if the Memoirs take us into a world of wealth and power, there is another world with which Holmes became equally well acquainted: that raffish demimonde his half-dozen carefully contrived ‘other selves’ could penetrate without endangering the life—of reputation—of Sherlock Holmes. The adventures of these masquerade characters, ranging from ‘a groom out of livery’ to a female temperance campaigner, throw new and amusing light on Holmes’s ‘undercover’ activities.

Holmes touches only occasionally in these Memoirs on his actual methods of detection; he is concerned primarily with describing the world in which he flourished, and his place in it. Almost every great name in modern history up to World War I—in the United States as well as in the Old World—appears in the dramatis personae of Sherlock Holmes’s astonishing life.
(front flap)