Although Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, he also wrote many other books including a science fiction series and several non-fiction works. The Firm of Girdlestone (1891) is subtitled "A Romance of the Unromantic." The proprietor and his son of the firm of Gladstone are the villains in this story. They have run their firm in an amoral fashion for years. The father and son team try to recoup their fortune by over insuring poorly run shipping ventures. They use rumor and speculation to fix the diamond prices. The ultimate Victorian means of raising capitol is tried..that of getting an heiress to marry the son. The father believes himself to be a solid religious man, but in reality he is a hypocrite. As the story progresses the son becomes the dominant member of the team. He is less intelligent than his father but is far more brutal.
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The life of Arthur Conan Doyle illustrates the excitement and diversity of the Victorian age unlike that of any other single figure of the period. At different points in his life he was a surgeon on a whaling ship; a GP; an apprentice eye-surgeon; an unsuccessful parliamentary candidate (twice); a multi-talented sportsman; one of the inventors of cross-country skiing in Switzerland; a formidable public speaker; a campaigner against miscarriages of justice; a military strategist; a writer in a range of forms; and the head of an extraordinary family. In his autobiography, he wrote: 'I have had a life which, for variety and romance, could, I think, hardly be exceeded.' He was not wrong. But Conan Doyle was also a Victorian with a twist, a man of tensions and contradictions. He was fascinated by travel, exploration, and invention, indeed all things modern and technological; yet at the same time he was also very traditional, voicing support for values such as chivalry, duty, constancy, and honour. By the time of his death in July 1930 he was a celebrity, achieving worldwide fame and notoriety for his creation of the rationalist, scientific super-detective Sherlock Holmes; yet at the same time his later decades were taken up with his advocacy of the new religion of Spiritualism, in which he was a devoted believer.
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- A Study in Scarlet (Oxford World's Classics) by Arthur Conan Doyle in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Front Matter (3)
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Oxford World's Classics) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Front Matter (3)
- The True Crime Files of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Arthur Conan Doyle in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
- The Hound of the Baskervilles: Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes (Oxford World's Classics) by Arthur Conan Doyle in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
- The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic (Contributions to the Study of World Literature) by Catherine Wynne on page 43, and Back Matter
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