Sherlock Holmes The Unauthorized Biography

He has been called a genius and a fraud, a hero and an addict. He advised kings in their glittering palaces, then disappeared into the darkest alleys of London's criminal underworld. He was (and remains) a global icon, but he could pass his most ardent fan on the street without a flicker of recognition. Who was this Sherlock Holmes? Nick Rennison gathers the clues of a life lived among the stars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Oscar Wilde to Sigmund Freud, and uncovers startling, previously unknown information. How did a Cambridge drop-out and bit player on the London stage transform himself into a renowned "consulting detective"? Did he know the identity of Jack the Ripper? To where did Sherlock Holmes disappear after his presumed death in 1891? Sherlock Holmes answers these questions and many more as it careens through the most infamous crimes and historic events of the era, all in pursuit of the real man behind the greatest detective in modern fiction--and, just perhaps, nonfiction.Rennison, Nicholas is the author of 'Sherlock Holmes The Unauthorized Biography', published 2007 under ISBN 9780802143259 and ISBN 0802143253.