The Baskerville Legacy: A Confession - Hardcover

O'Connell, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1907595465 ISBN 13: 9781907595462

Publisher: Short Books Ltd, 2011

Synopsis

I like the way your mind works, said Doyle. We should work on something together. Pool our resources.
What do you say?
I said I would enjoy that very much.

When a young journalist, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, meets his writer hero Arthur Conan Doyle on a troop ship coming back from South Africa, he is delighted especially when the creator of Sherlock Holmes suggests they collaborate on a real creeper of a story.

But the experience will prove traumatic for both of them. And when the result of their labours, The Hound of the Baskervilles, is finally published, it will be credited to one author alone.

Based on real events, The Baskerville Legacy is a creeper in its own right: a thrilling, frequently terrifying exploration of friendship and rivalry, love and lust, ambition and the limits of talent. It takes us from the clattering heart of Edwardian London to the eerie stillness of ancient West Country moorland, where a treacherous mire might swallow a man in seconds...

About this title

Review:

A period-perfect exploration of ambition and resentment, ideal for a misty autumn night by the fireside --Financial Times

O'Connell infuses real events and people with fiction to make this clever, atmospheric and elegant chiller. --The Times

4/5 stars... A thrilling novella... Doyle himself becomes not a villain but a dark character bedevilled by a complex private life and his mania for spiritualism... A rip-roaring addition to the extended library of all things Holmes. --Metro

Engrossing... an eerie, pitch-perfect gothic tale, but it is also more than just a piece of literary archeology, probing questions of authorial ownership and fate and language in an atmospheric tour de force. --Catholic Herald

About the Author:

John O Connell worked for several years at the London listings magazine Time Out, where he was Books Editor. He now writes, mostly about books, for The Times, The Guardian, New Statesman and The National. He is the author of I Told You I Was Ill: Adventures in Hypochondria (Short Books, 2005) and The Midlife Manual (Short Books, 2010). He is 37 and lives in south London with his wife and two children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Short Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1907595465
• ISBN 13: 9781907595462
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192