The Tale of Halcyon Crane

The Tale of Halcyon Crane
by Wendy Webb
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9780805091403
Publication Date: March 30, 2010
Pages: 328
Genre: Fiction, Suspense
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

When a mysterious letter lands in Hallie James's mailbox, her life is upended. Hallie was raised by her loving father, having been told her mother died in a fire decades earlier. But it turns out that her mother, Madlyn, was alive until very recently. Why would Hallie's father have taken her away from Madlyn? What really happened to her family thirty years ago?

In search of answers, Hallie travels to the place where her mother lived, a remote island in the middle of the Great Lakes. The stiff islanders fix her first with icy stares and then unabashed amazement as they recognize why she looks so familiar, and Hallie quickly realizes her family's dark secrets are enmeshed in the history of this strange place. But not everyone greets her with such a chilly reception—a coffee-shop owner and the family's lawyer both warm to Hallie, and the possibility of romance blooms. And then there's the grand Victorian house bequeathed to her—maybe it's the eerie atmosphere or maybe it's the prim, elderly maid who used to work for her mother, but Hallie just can't shake the feeling that strange things are starting to happen . . .

Meh. A good story, but not a well told one. In the author’s defence, I think it’s her first book, published about 12 years ago and the only one published by Henry Holt (I believe all the rest of her books are published by an Amazon subsidiary).

The premise of the story is a gripping one: when Hallie was 5, her father faked her and his deaths, spiriting her away to the other side of the country, convincing her that her mother died in a house fire where everything was lost. He gets away with it for over 30 years, until early-onset Alzheimer’s sets in and a picture of him and Hallie end up in the newspaper honouring him for his dedicated teaching career. Her mother, thinking her dead all these years, finds out, only to write her a letter, conveniently change her will, and die of a heart attack, leaving Hallie the sole heir of a mother she thought long dead and never got to meet. A day later, her father passes too.

This is where the book begins, with Hallie heading to the island in Lake Superior, devastated and in shock and wondering why her perfect and adored father would have committed such a crime.

This is definitely a ghost story, unlike my first Wendy Webb (also the most recent, I believe). It’s just not a very spooky one, although it definitely should be; the crap that went down in that house should have made me hair stand on end. But it didn’t.

This also tries to be a romance. I like both the characters and I don’t doubt they fell in loved and lived happily ever after, but I wasn’t moved by it.

I’m pretty sure there’s supposed to be an element of suspense, but I never felt suspended. I was pretty certain I knew who Iris was, and although I was correct, there is a twist at the end I didn’t anticipate at all. It should have been more shocking than it was, and instead it just left me surprised; a ‘huh’ instead of a ‘holy crap!’.

Like I said, a lot of good elements, but executed clumsily. I feel like, had this story been written by someone like Simone St. James, I’d have had to sleep with the lights on for a week. Instead, I’m not sure I’ll remember much of it by the time I go to sleep tonight.

how to: absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems

how to: absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems
by Randall Munroe
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781473680333
Publication Date: September 10, 2019
Pages: 308
Genre: Non-fiction, Science
Publisher: John Murray

The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the million-selling What If? and Thing Explainer
For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole.

If you’ve ever read Randall Munroe’s xkcd website, or his first book, What If? you know what to expect from How To…

If you haven’t, and you like physics, or imagining really weird scenarios and outrageous, possibly dangerous or lethal solutions to ordinary problems, or both, I definitely recommend checking this book out. It’s exactly what it says on the tin: common problems that the author has unleashed his imagination (or the imagination of others) on to create the most absurd possible solutions. We’re talking level 10 absurdity, but there’s also a lot of excellent science in these absurd solutions and solid explanations why these solutions wouldn’t work that range from “it would take more money than you’d save” (digging for treasure), to “this will likely kill you” (surviving re-entry of the ISS), to “the end of life – and the universe – as we know it” (triggering vacuum decay to power your house).

I kept thinking as I was reading this that it would make a really fun supplementary text in high school physics. Want to increase uptake of STEM subjects? Show kids how to figure out the end of the universe, or how much fuel it would take to send their house into space.

A Table Near the Band

A Table Near the Band
by A.A. Milne
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1950
Pages: 223
Genre: Fiction, Literature
Publisher: Methuen

It’s not often that a collection of stories comes along that doesn’t have a mix of average, above-average and maybe a couple of bombs. When I wrote my reading status update for A Table Near the Band I didn’t really have a lot of confidence that the stories would continue to be the same high-quality delight that the first two proved to be – what would be the chances? Imagine my surprise to find that, with the exception of 1 story, the entire collection never failed to surprise, entertain and charm.

I have to start first with the dedication, because it made me laugh:

To
THE READER
Whose weekly parcel from the Library has included
this or that book, either because it has been re-
commended by a friend or because the author’s
previous work has recommended itself:
Who has flipped through the pages in happy anticipa-
tion and found that it is a book of short stories :
Who has said disappointedly
“Oh! short stories, and
has put it aside and settled down to one of the
other books

I DEDICATE THIS ONE
At the same time pointing out to her that completely
revealing titles which are both attractive and as
yet unused are hard to come by, and that after all
one should expect

A TABLE NEAR THE BAND
to offer a view of other tables, at each one of which
some story may well be in the making.

How often have I done this to myself – buying a book thinking it a story only to find it’s a collection of them. Thankfully, this was not one of those books, but one I did buy on the strength of A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

A list of the stories, with individual ratings and a sentence worth of blurb follows:

A Table Near the Band: 5 stars. The titular story and a short comedy of … not errors, but a neat encapsulation of the foibles of both genders. Neither side comes out looking good, but it’s light and amusing.

The Prettiest Girl in the Room: 5 stars. This one starts out sad and depressing, but midway through turns into a sweet, generous tale that manages to warm the heart without the saccharine side-effects.

A Man Greatly Beloved: 5 stars. I was completely knocked back by this story; it starts off quietly and as though it could be predictable, although the narrator’s voice has an unintended cheekiness to it that is amusing. The story than abruptly turns into an altogether different animal that leaves the reader foundering a bit, but Milne closes the story as gracefully as can be imagined.

The Rise and Fall of Mortimer Scrivens: 5 stars. An epistolary short story that had me laughing at the ‘villain’s’ comeuppance, done in a way that really only British humour can pull off.

Christmas Party: 4.5 stars. Family holidays from an untapped perspective, but which one anyone part of a married couple has experienced, and Milne delivers on the ultimate irony of the perpetual perception of the importance of family togetherness.

The Three Dreams of Mr. Findlater: 4 stars. Disturbing. Well-written but with an ending that leaves the reader both crying deus ex machina! and floundering with judgement of the character.

The River: 4 stars. This one was well-written but an odd duck. The premise – the power of a powerful coincidence – works well enough, but given the reader knows the ultimate end of the story from almost the beginning, it fails to have the power it might have had under different circumstances.

Murder at Eleven: 3 stars. The weakest, by far, of all the stories and a murder mystery, but a transparent one. Luckily, it’s short.

A Rattling Good Yarn: 5 stars. A humorous tale about how revenge can be subtle and still be sweet.

Portrait of Lydia: 4 stars. Another mystery, but better written; the reader knows there’s something hinky but doesn’t get all the details until the end, when the protagonist finds out years later.

The Wibberly Touch: 4.5 stars. I want to call this another ironic story, but I’m not sure it is; it’s obvious that Milne writes with a satiric pen about a character that’s not nearly as suave or as good as he thinks he is, but the reader is left thinking he’s an ass, but is a really a dishonest one?

Before the Flood: 4.5 stars. Not a morality tale, but a different perspective on the events proceeding the great biblical flood. Told with humor, but not with disrespect.

The Balcony: 5 stars. This one is the most theological and not necessarily one that a lot of people would consider good, but it resonated with me a great deal because Milne plays with the average person’s overly simplified idea of judgement and heaven. It’s a short piece but it balances angst and hope reasonably well, leaving an ending that is up to the reader to decide.

From a strictly mathematical point of view, the collection is not quite 4.5 stars, but I rounded up in acknowledgement of a collection that I never shied away from picking back up. Milne wasn’t just a gifted children’s author, but a gifted author, capable of charming both young and old.

Einstein’s War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of WWI

Einstein's War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I
by Matthew Stanley
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781524745417
Publication Date: May 21, 2019
Pages: 391
Genre: History, Science
Publisher: Dutton

Few recognize how the Great War, the industrialized slaughter that bled Europe from 1914 to 1918, shaped Einstein&;s life and work. While Einstein never held a rifle, he formulated general relativity blockaded in Berlin, literally starving. He lost fifty pounds in three months, unable to communicate with his most important colleagues. Some of those colleagues fought against rabid nationalism; others were busy inventing chemical warfare&;being a scientist trapped you in the power plays of empire. Meanwhile, Einstein struggled to craft relativity and persuade the world that it was correct. This was, after all, the first complete revision of our conception of the universe since Isaac Newton, and its victory was far from sure.

Scientists seeking to confirm Einstein&;s ideas were arrested as spies. Technical journals were banned as enemy propaganda. Colleagues died in the trenches. Einstein was separated from his most crucial ally by barbed wire and U-boats. This ally was the Quaker astronomer and Cambridge don A. S. Eddington, who would go on to convince the world of the truth of relativity and the greatness of Einstein.

In May of 1919, when Europe was still in chaos from the war, Eddington led a globe-spanning expedition to catch a fleeting solar eclipse for a rare opportunity to confirm Einstein&;s bold prediction that light has weight. It was the result of this expedition&;the proof of relativity, as many saw it&;that put Einstein on front pages around the world. Matthew Stanley&;s epic tale is a celebration of how bigotry and nationalism can be defeated and of what science can offer when they are.

As I mentioned in an earlier reading status post, I was both drawn to this book and apprehensive about reading it. I wanted it for the bits about Einstein and relativity, but I’ve had it up to my eyeballs in the hypocrisy and vicious hate that’s the order of our days (unless I’m at the hydrotherapy pool, and then I’m all about the hate, because seriously, parents need to learn, and then teach their unruly monsters, some damn common courtesy – especially when they share the pool with frail, injured and/or elderly tax-payers. But I digress.)

I decided to read the prologue and was immediately sucked in, and I figured I could skim the war bits if they started dragging me down. The war bits did drag me down, but I didn’t skim, because this book was so much more than I expected it to be in a lot of unexpected ways.

This book is not only the story of how Einstein became Einstein, it’s the story about how his theory came into this world, bit by bit, painful mistake after painful fruitless searching, with duct-tape slapped on and removed, rationalisations made, and the whole thing scrapped and started over again. I found this part enlightening because modern tellings tend to make people think the general theory of relativity just sprouted fully formed one day from Einstein’s pencil. I also enjoyed his small attempts, with illustrations, to describe aspects of relativity, and that he included details about some of the thought experiments that Einstein used.

This book is also about A.S. Eddington, a brilliant British mathematician turned astronomer, a Quaker, and a conscientious objector during WWI. It’s about how his faith informed every part of his life, and his refusal to divorce his religious beliefs from his work when the British government tried to demand it of him. It’s about how his religion guided his efforts to repair the integrity of international science when it was thought to be irreconcilably broken, and how his choice for this international bridge building – proving a calculation that verified Einstein’s theory of relativity, via the 1919 solar eclipse – and how he went about doing it, was largely responsible for turning Einstein into science’s first and only genuine superstar. It’s about one man’s efforts to quietly and modestly fight the vicious hate and anger that permeated every part of the UK at the time.

I loved this book. I took half a star off because the author’s fast and loose, zig-zagging time lines during the war years drove me crazy. I know it’s difficult to be linear about complex historical events that happened in tandem, but I’d be reading about events in 1918, thinking we were getting to the end of the war, and suddenly the author had me back in 1917 without the appropriate signage. This happened a few times and left me lost on every occasion.

But putting that aside, I loved this book. I wasn’t expecting the respect the author showed towards Eddington’s religious integrity. I wasn’t expecting the author’s objectivity when acknowledging Einstein’s controversies, small though they might seem in the grand scheme of things. (I’m completely icked out by the fact that he told Elsa and her daughter that it made no difference to him which one of them he married.)

I liked that Stanley addressed and discussed the question of how much Einstein’s ex-wife Mileva may have contributed to his work, and I really liked how the author included the female scientists throughout the years that touched on Einstein’s work or life. I loved that when he did so, it was casually, in the same narrative tone and voice he used for everything else in the book, like women working in science wasn’t special, or unique. He was honest about their chances of advancement, or of even getting paid, but he didn’t treat them like they were some rare exotic or token.

Where the author really earned my respect though, was at the end. Up until that last chapter, I thought the book insightful, thoughtful, well-written and engaging, but the last chapter really brought home the author’s sense of balance. I can do no better than to quote him. Warning, this quote is long.

Everyone wants a simple explanation for why things turn out as
they do. Popper thought the expeditions were extraordinary and made
them exemplars of good science. Everitt thought the expeditions were
biased and made them exemplars of bad science. Collins and Pinch
thought the expeditions were shaped by politics and authority, and
made them exemplars of socially constructed science

Einstein’s War has been a story about how none of those are enough.
Einstein and relativity’s victory involved good science, bad science,
politics, and personal authority. Any episode in science does. None of
those mean relativity is wrong (it has been confirmed many, many
times since then) or that Eddington fudged the numbers (there were
good reasons to trust the 1919 results). Science is done by people. That
means it will be inherently complicated and often confusing. People
will make mistakes, equipment will break, poor decisions will be made
because of political or personal bias.

Note that you could replace “science” and “scientist” in this last paragraph with any profession in the world today and it would be just as apt, and just as relevant.

We do not have to be forced into extremes. The presence of human
scientists does not make science unreliable. We need to understand,
though, what science-done-by-people actually looks like and how it
works. That means leaving behind some comforting myths about the
dispassionate, purely rational, always-objective nature of science. The
deeply human, sometimes chaotic story of relativity is not an excep-
tion. It is an exemplar. Science is messy, it is also a powerful way to
learn about the real world around us.

By the end of this book I was wanting to yell “Preach it!” Given that I’ve never uttered those two words, never-mind thought them, in the whole of my modestly repressed life, they’re probably the best summation for just how much this book resonated with me. Overall, it as just a really excellent read.

Reading Status: A Table Near the Band

A Table Near the Band
by A.A. Milne
Publication Date: January 1, 1950
Pages: 223
Genre: Fiction, Literature
Publisher: Methuen

I grabbed this book as a counter-balance to Einstein’s War, and while I’m only 30 pages and 2 stories in, it’s charming so far! A.A. Milne has given me a wry and humorous story and a sweet one that manages to be sweet without being saccharine or overly sentimental. If the rest of the stories are this good this collection will be a treasure.

Reading Status: Einstein’s War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I

Einstein's War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I
by Matthew Stanley
isbn: 9781524745417
Publication Date: May 21, 2019
Pages: 391
Genre: History, Science
Publisher: Dutton

Few recognize how the Great War, the industrialized slaughter that bled Europe from 1914 to 1918, shaped Einstein&;s life and work. While Einstein never held a rifle, he formulated general relativity blockaded in Berlin, literally starving. He lost fifty pounds in three months, unable to communicate with his most important colleagues. Some of those colleagues fought against rabid nationalism; others were busy inventing chemical warfare&;being a scientist trapped you in the power plays of empire. Meanwhile, Einstein struggled to craft relativity and persuade the world that it was correct. This was, after all, the first complete revision of our conception of the universe since Isaac Newton, and its victory was far from sure.

Scientists seeking to confirm Einstein&;s ideas were arrested as spies. Technical journals were banned as enemy propaganda. Colleagues died in the trenches. Einstein was separated from his most crucial ally by barbed wire and U-boats. This ally was the Quaker astronomer and Cambridge don A. S. Eddington, who would go on to convince the world of the truth of relativity and the greatness of Einstein.

In May of 1919, when Europe was still in chaos from the war, Eddington led a globe-spanning expedition to catch a fleeting solar eclipse for a rare opportunity to confirm Einstein&;s bold prediction that light has weight. It was the result of this expedition&;the proof of relativity, as many saw it&;that put Einstein on front pages around the world. Matthew Stanley&;s epic tale is a celebration of how bigotry and nationalism can be defeated and of what science can offer when they are.

I picked this off the TBR shelves yesterday because Einstein! I almost put it back because Nationalism! War! and I’m in the mood for neither. I decided to read the prologue, and got completely sucked in.

I’m only 60 pages in, so Einstein and Eddington are still relative newbies to the science scene and WWI is only a gleam in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s eye, but I’m thoroughly sucked it. I’m really enjoying the author’s way of leading the reader through all of Einstein’s papers, so it’s apparent that the general theory of relativity was a process that was built upon, layer by layer, instead of something that sprouted fully formed one day. I’m also appreciating the graphs and illustrations, even if the mathematical formulas are way over my pay-grade.

I’m really hoping my zeal for the book will withstand WWI.

The Book of Forgotten Authors

The Book of Forgotten Authors
by Christopher Fowler
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781786484895
Publication Date: October 5, 2017
Pages: 374
Genre: Books and Reading, Non-fiction
Publisher: River Run Books

"Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. It makes people think you're dead."

So begins Christopher Fowler's foray into the back catalogues and backstories of 99 authors who, once hugely popular, have all but disappeared from our shelves.

Whether male or female, domestic or international, flash-in-the-pan or prolific, mega-seller or prize-winner - no author, it seems, can ever be fully immune from the fate of being forgotten. And Fowler, as well as remembering their careers, lifts the lid on their lives, and why they often stopped writing or disappeared from the public eye.

These 99 journeys are punctuated by 12 short essays about faded once-favourites: including the now-vanished novels Walt Disney brought to the screen, the contemporary rivals of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie who did not stand the test of time, and the women who introduced us to psychological suspense many decades before it conquered the world.

This is a book about books and their authors. It is for book lovers, and is written by one who could not be a more enthusiastic, enlightening and entertaining guide.

The 4th star I’m giving this book, a collection of 99 authors who have been ‘forgotten’, is a tip of the hat bump-up for witty dialog that made me chuckle throughout the book, and for giving me a handful of author names worth researching for future used bookstore treasures.

Otherwise, this is a collection of 99 authors who have been ‘forgotten’, along with a half-dozen or so essays that discuss additional forgotten authors, that is made a bit average through sheer volume. It’s both a book that doesn’t lend itself to reading through, nor dipping into here and there. It’s best read in chunks, I guess, but then one is apt to get to authors who write – or wrote – in areas of no interest to the reader, and suddenly there’s skimming and skipping.

There are a number of authors Fowler includes that I’ve not only heard of and/or read, but whose titles are actively sitting on my shelves: Allington, Wheatley, Orczy, Mitchell and Crispin, among others. This made me feel oddly better about myself in a way I probably shouldn’t admit to, but there it is; suddenly my wall of cozies seem a tiny bit elevated by sharing company with these names who have been deemed worth remembering.

Behold Here’s Poison

Behold, Here's Poison
by Georgette Heyer
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 0434328448
Publication Date: January 1, 1972
Pages: 320
Genre: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Publisher: Heinemann

This is a book I should have enjoyed more than I did. The dialog between characters is scathing, often hilarious in a ‘I can’t believe he/she said that out loud’ kind of way, and the murder was clever and the karma both just and tragic. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, so much as I think I might have been better off choosing something else at that moment, with the result that I was impatient with the reading of it. It’s a weird place to be when you’re reading thinking this is good and are we done yet? at the same time.

Heyer’s strong point in writing wasn’t her detectives; Hannasyde is flat and Hemingway needs to switch to decaf, but the rest of the cast of characters are all vividly written, and as I said, the dialog scorching. Mrs. Lupton came on the scene with a speech that had me laughing and wanting to stand and applaud and the rest of the case all have a shot at each other at least once or twice.

The romance, arguably Heyer’s raison d’être, just … failed. To put those two together with so little development or subtlety makes me wonder if Heyer hated these characters and wanted them so suffer. I mean, there’s playful verbal sparring, and there’s what these two were doing. Me? I don’t find anything romantic about being called a little idiot.

The Keepers of Metsan Valo

The Keepers of Metsan Valo
by Wendy Webb
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9781542021623
Publication Date: October 1, 2021
Pages: 299
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing

In Metsan Valo, her family home on Lake Superior, Anni Halla’s beloved grandmother has died. Among her fond memories, what Anni remembers most vividly is her grandmother’s eerie yet enchanting storytelling. By firelight she spun tall tales of spirits in the nearby forest and waters who could heal or harm on a whim. But of course those were only stories…

The reading of the will now occasions a family reunion. Anni and her twin brother, their almost otherworldly mother, and relatives Anni hasn’t seen in forever some with good reason are all brought back together under one roof that strains to hold all their tension. But it’s not just Anni’s family who is unsettled. Whispers wind through the woods. Laughter bursts from bubbling streams. Raps from unseen hands rupture on the walls. Fireflies swarm and nightmares stir. With each odd occurrence, Anni fears that her return has invited less a welcoming and more a warning.

When another tragedy strikes near home, Anni must dive headfirst into the mysterious happenings to discover the truth about her home, her family, and the wooded island’s ancient lore. Plunging into the past may be the only way to save her family from whatever bedevils Metsan Valo.

Wendy Webb is an author that shows up as similar/recommended for those that enjoy the ghost stories of Simone St. James, so when MT was headed to the library, I had him pick up the only title of hers currently available. It was a quick read, done in a day, and it kept my attention with interesting main characters and rich atmosphere, but I have a couple of thoughts about the Simone St. James comparison.

Reading the acknowledgments at the end, the author states that this book came about much different from her others, that rather than starting with a particular house, The Keepers of Metsan Valo started from a desire to write about her Finnish mythological roots. So that may, perhaps, explain why this is not a ghost story, or anything like Simone St. James. This book is best described as Magical Realism, and its more apt comparative author would be Sarah Addison Allen, or maybe at a stretch, an edgy Heather Webber.

If I’d gone into this book with that expectation, I’d probably have enjoyed it more – it’s not a bad book, and I liked her writing enough that I’d probably read another. The thing is, it appears that all the books she writes are the standalone type with overlapping characters. I realised this midway through the book when one of the characters describes the synopsis of another of Webb’s titles that I recognised from prior research. Unfortunately, the characters precedes to spoil that particular book’s plot. The mc of this book also spoils the plot of another of Webb’s books, although not quite to the same degree, I suspect. So if you want to try this author be aware that if you don’t start with the first of her books you may get more information about prior plots than you’d prefer. The good news is that the town of Wharton is delightful, so reading more books set there might be enough to soften prior knowledge.

There were moments where the author got overly sentimental, and the characters all got a fairy tale happy ending which, for me, blunted my enjoyment of the book. I like a HEA, but I prefer a realistic one, and this one was not realistic, and I’m not talking about the mystical elements. This family came together with a lot of tension and they went away all happy-happy-joy-love with absolutely no effort in between. It was all way too neat and pat. Putting that aside though, there was enough to like that, as I said earlier, I’d read one more.

The Sherlock Holmes Companion

The Sherlock Holmes Companion
by Michael Hardwick, Mollie Hardwick
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 0517219166
Publication Date: January 1, 1962
Pages: 262
Genre: Books and Reading, Reference
Publisher: Bramhall House

One of my acquisitions from my visit to the Berkelouw Book Barn, this isn’t really a sit-down-and-read book, so much as it’s a handy reference of characters, story plots and a selection of quotes (which I found to be a mediocre selection, at best). But there are two ‘chapters’ at the back that offer small biographies of Sherlock and Holmes, and one of Conan Doyle himself.

The Sherlock/Watson biographies about what you’d expect, although I’m constantly amazed, whenever I read these types of things, how much presumption is done on the part of the fans who write them, no matter how learned those fans are. I can never get through one without periodic outbursts along the lines of give me a break!. While this one was no different, I was, at least relieved to see that the authors dismissed the nonsense that Holmes, pre-Watson, had had a great love that died, leaving him unable to ever love again.

The chapter of Conan Doyle’s mini-biography was concise but packed with his life, including quite a few facts I’d yet to read about (I have Hesketh’s biography waiting for me on my TBR, and one of these days I’m going to get ahold of Dickson Carr’s ACD bio too). ACD was not only an author of mythical skill, he was a truely good man who fought for pretty much any cause that needed fighting for, and a prescient man, correctly forseeing what a war with submarines and advanced weaponry would mean for the crumbling empire soon the enter WWI. That question that makes the rounds every once in awhile: who would you go back in time to speak with, if you could? Without question, it would be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, every time.