44. The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes, with Andrew Lycett

This episode, we welcome to the podcast author, journalist, and biographer Andrew Lycett to talk about his latest book, The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes, released in October 2023.

You can listen to the episode below, or on your podcaster of choice.

About Andrew Lycett

Born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, Andrew Lycett lived in East Africa (Tanganyika) until he was eight, and then in Yorkshire, Dublin and Sussex. He was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford.

Since the mid-1990s, he has concentrated on writing non-fiction books, mainly biographies, including works on Ian Fleming, Rudyard Kipling, Dylan Thomas, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle. His 2007 biography Conan Doyle – The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, is well-regarded as one of the most comprehensive and authoritative works on Conan Doyle. Andrew has also written books on travel writing, including Kipling Abroad (2010) and Conan Doyle’s Wide World (2020).

Andrew has edited and contributed to several other books, including the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and his journalistic output includes feature articles, book reviews and radio broadcasts. He speaks regularly at literary festivals, in schools and in universities, and at other events on the subjects of his books and aspects of current affairs. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, as well as of the Royal Geographical Society, and committee member of the Kipling Society.

He lives in North London. At weekends In the summer he is to be found somewhere in the Home Counties, keeping wicket for the GTs, a travelling team of cricketers (Abridged from Source).

https://www.andrewlycett.co.uk/

The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes (2023)

Questing was Sherlock Holmes’s business. He famously adopted the latest forensic techniques, channelled the Victorian passion for enquiry, kept abreast of the key scientific breakthroughs of his age, and conducted his investigations in an enigmatic and stylised manner. And the brains behind it all was, of course, the great Arthur Conan Doyle.

In this deep dive into the contemporary world of Holmes and Conan Doyle, biographer Andrew Lycett explores all that encompasses the world of the great detective – tracing the infamous character’s own interests, personality and mythologised biography alongside that of his creator’s.

From the Victorian crazes for detection and séance, to contemporary developments in science and psychology, Lycett weaves together everything that inspired Conan Doyle in creating the world’s most famous detective and one of fiction's most enduring, enigmatic and recognisable characters.

Purchase from the publisher here.

Other works by Andrew Lycett

Rudyard Kipling (1997)

Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes (2007)

Kipling Abroad (2010)

Ian Fleming: The Man Who Created James Bond (2012)

Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation (2013)

Dylan Thomas: A New Life (2014)

Conan Doyle’s Wide World (2020)

Next time on Doings of Doyle

We take a look at one of Conan Doyle’s earliest works, ‘The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe (c.1877), which was unpublished in his day and finally printed in 2000. You can read the story here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Haunted_Grange_of_Goresthorpe  

Acknowledgements

Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our supporters on Patreon and Paypal.

Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.

Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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