Description
Book SynopsisThe real-life mystery featuring the two men - Joseph Bell and Henry Littlejohn - who inspired the creation of Sherlock Holmes.
December 1893. Arthur Conan Doyle shocks his legions of fans by killing off the world’s favourite fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. Meanwhile, in Scotland, a sensational real-life murder trial is playing out. Alfred Monson, a scion of the aristocracy, is charged with killing a young army lieutenant, Cecil Hambrough, on the sprawling Ardlamont estate. The worlds of crime fiction and crime fact are about to collide spectacularly.
Among the key prosecution witnesses that the Ardlamont case brought together were two esteemed Edinburgh doctors, Joseph Bell and Henry Littlejohn. Bell - Doyle's tutor when the author studied medicine in the 1870s - had recently been unmasked as the inspiration behind the creation of Sherlock Holmes (Doyle said of Bell, ‘It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes…'). But
