Review
Someone, I think it was the noted Janeite Lord David Cecil, once said that Jane Austen was the kind of writer on whose laundry lists and notes to the milkman any keen reader would pounce. While Conan Doyle may not be considered to be in quite that category there can be no doubt that the heart of every lover of British writing will rejoice at this discovery of an early and as yet unpublished work by the creator of Holmes, Watson, Moriarty and Professor Challenger. The breadth, depth and scope of Conan Doyle's knowledge and curiosity is often overlooked. He was the first popular writer to tell the wider reading public about narcotics, the Ku Klux Klan, the mafia, the Mormons, American crime gangs, corrupt union bosses and much else besides. His boundless energy, enthusiasm and wide-ranging mind, not to mention the pitch-perfect, muscular and memorable prose is all on display here in a work whose publication is very very welcome indeed. --Stephen Fry, May 2011
Robert Lindsay ... discriminates consistently and wittily among these characters. There is an element of tour de force as the actor must vivify the entire cast, and Lindsay rises admirably to the challenge. He 'does' Mrs Rundle with unpatronising sympathy, and is very funny at the expense of the obsequious curate. When he is not talking to - or at - these people, he addresses his listeners with warmth and wit. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that this fragment will be seized on by Doyle's devotees - possibly adding to their number. --Brian McFarlane, Australian Book Review, March 2012
Robert Lindsay ... discriminates consistently and wittily among these characters. There is an element of tour de force as the actor must vivify the entire cast, and Lindsay rises admirably to the challenge. He 'does' Mrs Rundle with unpatronising sympathy, and is very funny at the expense of the obsequious curate. When he is not talking to - or at - these people, he addresses his listeners with warmth and wit. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that this fragment will be seized on by Doyle's devotees - possibly adding to their number. --Brian McFarlane, Australian Book Review, March 2012
Product Description
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his first novel The Narrative of John Smith in 1883 when he was just 23, living in Portsmouth and struggling to establish himself as a doctor and a writer. Never published before, it has exceptional value as a window into the mind of the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and many of the themes and tropes of Conan Doyle's later writing can clearly be seen. Via the protagonist, John Smith, a 50-year-old man confined to his room by an attack of gout, Conan Doyle sets down his thoughts and opinions on a range of subjects – literature, science, religion, war and education – making it a novel of considerable biographical importance. While it is more a string of ruminations than a fully developed novel, The Narrative of John Smith is, nevertheless, a fascinating record of an early attempt at writing by a man who was on his way to becoming one of the best-known authors in the world.
