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Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell: A Victorian Murder Mystery

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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!"

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.

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.