A dead opera star, a brilliant anatomy professor with Sherlockian powers of deduction and a moody Victorian backdrop--it all adds up to a thrillingly entertaining historical mystery. Howard Engel is the award-winning writer whose Benny Cooperman mysteries garner rave international reviews--fans stretch to thirteen countries from Canada to Japan, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and the U.S. His latest, Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell, is a brilliant departure from the Cooperman series, set in the Edinburgh of late 1800s and peopled with such illustrious historical figures as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Benjamin Disraeli. Julian Symons called Engel's first non-series mystery Murder in Montparnasse first class entertainment, stylishly written . . . Engel can turn a phrase as neatly as Chandler." The year is 1879 and Alan Lambert has been tried, convicted and sentenced to hang for the murder of a dazzling opera star and her lover. But Lambert's brother believes in his innocence and pleads with Dr. Bell, a celebrated professor of anatomy, to uncover the truth. Dr. Bell agrees and sets out to crack the case, with his keen powers of deduction and the help of his young student, Arthur Conan Doyle. The exuberant plot of Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell carries readers across the roof tops of Edinburgh and descends into the thickets of municipal corruption. Fans of Sherlock Holmes will immediately recognize Holmes in Dr. Joseph Bell, who in real life was Conan Doyle's model for his famous sleuth.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Canadian Engel's serviceable venture into the Sherlock Holmes genre suffers by comparison to David Pirie's The Patient's Eyes (2002), likewise substituting a young Arthur Conan Doyle and his real-life mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell, for Watson and Holmes. When a beautiful opera singer and her lover are found brutally slain, suspicion falls on Alan Lambert, "a man of good family fallen upon evil days," whose brother asks Bell for assistance. As the doctor and his protege race the clock to save Lambert from the gallows, Edinburgh's power elite impedes their efforts at every turn. Undeterred, the pair persists in exploring numerous avenues of inquiry that the police have ignored or discounted. While the period details ring true and Bell is a convincing master detective, with his deductions based on careful observation and encyclopedic knowledge, his personality remains far less developed than that of Pirie's hero. Similarly, Engel barely alludes to Doyle's well-documented family difficulties, which provided Pirie with ample grist for making the future creator of Sherlock Holmes sympathetic and complex. Moreover, the murderer's identity will come as less than a surprise to most readers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Mr. Engel is a born writer, a natural stylist . . . This is a writer who can bring a character to life in a few lines. (Ruth Rendell)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Conan the Victorian,
By
This review is from: Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell (Hardcover)
I read this almost immediately upon completing David Pirie's "The Night Calls", another novel that uses the characters of Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Joseph Bell as "real-life" stand-ins for Doyle's illustrious Sherlock Holmes, and the variations are fascinating.Whereas Pirie paints a dark moodish piece with all of his characters (including the leads) as sombre, haunted individuals caught in a web of horror and intrigue, Engel's picture is bright, snappy, and breezy (or as much so as possible given that it details a wrongly convicted man facing the gallows). Pirie is rich in minute detail and atmosphere, Engel skips from scene to scene, plot point to plot point, like a runner trying to break the hundrde yard dash. In sum, I must confess that Pirie's book, the second in his Doyle/Bell series, is much more literary and engrossing but Engel's, originally published in paperback in 1997, is simply, a lot more fun. As they say in the ads though; "even better, try them both!"
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Bell tolls for justice!,
By Jack Maybrick (Shuttling between the streets of Whitechapel and the shadow of Coogan's Bluff) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell (Hardcover)
Arthur Conan Doyle's inspiration for Sherlock Holmes really did come from one of his mentors at Edinburgh University, Dr. Joseph Bell, a surgeon who discerned amazing information from strangers by observing minute details about them.While Doyle came to weary of his association with the world's most famous literary detective, he shared many of Holmes's qualities, including the abilities of observation and deduction learned from Dr. Bell, and he actually did lend his efforts to the consideration of real-life mysteries from his own time. Howard Engel's novel is a clever tribute to Doyle, his mentor, and his creation. He ingeniously sets his murder mystery not in London, as might be supposed, but in Edinburgh and even more ingeniously (but inevitably, given the pecking order between Doyle and his professor) makes the youthful Doyle play Watson to Bell's Holmes. Gratefully, Bell is a little less brusque with minds less active than his own than is Holmes. Most ingeniously of all, the murder mystery that Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell are called upon to solve is based upon a genuinely celebrated murder case from Doyle's mature years that Doyle played a principal role in resolving - though again, in this setting, as a student in the year 1879, he plays an acolyte's role. Which murder case? I leave it to the reader to see if he recognizes it from the book, if he doesn't recognize it already. Engel himself provides the answer in his afterword. I am only familiar with one other novel in which this device is used and that would be Bruce Alexander's "Person or Persons Unknown", the fourth in Alexander's Sir John Fielding Series, in which the Jack-the-Ripper slayings are moved backward 100 years in time from the late 19th century to the late 18th century. Robert Louis Stevenson also makes a few cameo appearances as Doyle's college chum, and Doyle and Bell are also granted an interview with the great Disraeli ("Mr. Dizzy"). There are some annoying diversions that do not contribute to the story, and I assume that these are historical allusions that I failed to recognize. There are certainly a number of allusions to the Sherlock Holmes stories that Doyle will later write that the reader WILL recognize. I'd like to see more murder mysteries in this vein - though I'm not sure that the world is ready for a story about Oliver Stone, as a precocious fourth-grader (in Donald J. Sobol's "Encyclopedia Brown" vein), solving a mysterious shooting at a presidential motorcade in downtown Fresno during the Eisenhower years.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another take on the origins of Sherlock Holmes,
By
This review is from: Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell (A Victorian Mystery) (Paperback)
Another author (in addition to David Pirie) has chosen the Conan Doyle - Joseph Bell relationship as the basis for a novel. The story hangs together well, and the book is well written, after the reader gets past a few glaring problems - primarily the misinterpretation of Arthur Conan Doyle's name. Conan Doyle is a Welsh surname, and I doubt seriously anyone would ever seriously call him 'Conan'. Joseph Bell as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes is well documented, and this conjectural work provides an interesting look at how it may have worked to influence Conan Doyle.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
