Andrew LycettReseñas

I'm a huge Wilkie Collins fan, so perhaps I'd prefer a hagiography. I felt like this work was rather colorless, given the humor and talent possessed by its subject. I got the feeling the writer did not appreciate Collins position as an innovator in mystery and thought of him as more of a second fiddle to Dickens. He gave pages to his later works and their shortcomings, but really failed to communicate just what a ruckus woman in white and moonstone caused when they came out. He was pleased to have some detail about the two household Collins maintained, but really just engaged in a lot of speculation about them. That may be all that is possible, but it failed to satisfy me

The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes by Andrew Lycett examines the character from the perspective of his times, which of course was Doyle's times as well.

To put it in terms similar to Lycett's, this looks at how Holmes is a reflection of that period, but a reflection specifically through the eyes (pen?) of Doyle. That isn't to say that Holmes is a stand-in for Doyle, but that there is simply no singular perspective on any period of history, so understanding the person through which we are given our glimpse is essential. This isn't, however, a biography of Doyle but rather focuses on the major strands of thought and belief of the time.

This is an excellent companion for someone working their way through the stories and would be ideal for someone considering revisiting them. In fact, this has made me want to reread some of them. It also sheds some interesting light on TV and film representations. The reader can consider what liberties were taken to make the character more likely to be embraced by viewers at various times.

As a bit of an aside, I think this could be a useful read for a writer who is thinking about creating a character that would reflect our current times. How did Doyle create a character who could both embody much of the time yet also question, explicitly or implicitly, some of the ideals? This book doesn't necessarily answer that question, but it does offer some examples that a writer could apply to their own work.

I would definitely recommend this to those in the, as Lycett calls it, Sherlockian world. Even a casual reader (or viewer) of the Holmes stories will enjoy seeing how the character is a product of not just a fertile mind but of the time as well.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

Definitely the most comprehensive biography of James Bond’s creator to date, but at times it’s overwhelmed by extraneous detail that makes a confusing read. It has a surprisingly downbeat tone as Lycett debunks some Fleming myths while making only passing reference to others that I would have like to have seen explored in more detail. However it does provide an often disturbing insight into Fleming as a “deeply complex, unhappy, self-consuming person” who turned his internal turmoil to birth perhaps the most gripping creation of high-adventure and high-living in popular fiction.

A good read to understand the genius who created a contemporary icon and myth of intelligence; a reimagining of the English gentleman.½

Wilkie Collins was at the centre of artistic and intellectual Victorian life so this biography gives a detailed account of all the major characters of the time, most notably Collins' closest friend, Charles Dickens. While he was not as great a writer as Dickens, his life was every bit as interesting and even more unconventional. Most famously, he maintained nearby households in London with two different women neither of whom he married. Wilkie Collins was a free thinker - a strong supporter of women's rights, anti-organised religion, anti-royalist
and also a pacifist.
One of the aspects of Victorian life that comes out is the frequent poor health and early death, even of the upper and middle classes. Wilkie Collins suffered from a range of ailments for most of his life, especially gout and syphilis. All the illnesses led to a colossal intake of drugs, mostly laudanum and opium.
This biography is mostly fascinating - the subtitle, A Life of Sensation, referring both to the sub-genre of Victorian novels in which Wilkie Collins was a leader - the 'sensation' novels - and to the sensationalism of his own lifestyle. The most tedious part is all the detail of the numerous publishing deals and copyright arguments that he was engaged in. I would also warn any reader coming to this biography before reading the novels that the plots of most of them are given away and, if you haven't yet read his most famous novel, 'The Moonstone', then the various twists and the denouement are given revealed.

A highly detailed, exhaustatively researched, meticulous account of a complex man, with multiple facets & people, in his life. Nicely paced for the most part, in places there is a feeling of inertia about the narrative, & one feels that this is not due to the subject. It really is however, the definitive account of Ian Fleming. Less so, his creation, but more about him as a person, his peccadillos & the people & women in his life. A cautionary tale, but well told, with local interest to those who, like me, live in Kent. If you're after a James Bond origin story, whilst that material is covered, this probably isn't what you're looking for, dealing as it does, more with Fleming than Bond.½

Like most biographies, the first 200 pages of Lycett's book suffer from the impulse to list every person Fleming ever spoke to once on a train. Finally, though, at around page 216, we get to what we all came for-the genesis and process of the Bond novels. From that point, this book becomes clear and focused, and a joy to read. I appreciated Lycett's literary criticisms as well as his biographical sketches. His prose is clean, only occasionally slipping in to the three or more asides that seem to define the core style of other biography writers. I especially appreciated the last five pages, which let us know how things turned out for Caspar. HIGHLY recommended.

Great details on the man. I think the amount of details stemmed from the number of new sources permitted to be quoted for this new biography. Definitely a man of contradictions.

Rather longish biography of the man who created the James Bond books. It seemed to be a bit long on name-dropping, especially English peerage, and paramours. All the names with little to distinguish them made it confusing at times.

Almost a year after starting it, I’ve finished The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Time of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Please don’t think, however, that the slowness of my reading in any way indicates that I found this biography uninteresting; it’s simply an incredibly comprehensive, well-researched biography that I think will leave you with a very good insight into the creator of Sherlock Holmes. But it is slow reading, especially if you’re reading six or seven or eight other books equally … comprehensive (like an annotated Pride and Prejudice or P.G. Wodehouse A Life in Letters or Michael Wood’s The Story of England).

Inevitably, when you’re reading a book like this biography once a week for only thirty minutes or so before you go to sleep, you’ll spend a lot of time flipping back through pages, trying to remember who’s who. After all, Conan Doyle knew a lot of people and once the famous author hits his stride, you realize he was friends, enemies and frenemies with a lot of other famous figures, including H.G. Wells, P.G. Wodehouse, Rudyard Kipling and Harry Houdini. He was related by marriage to E.W. Hornung, the creator of gentleman thief Arthur J. Raffles. He championed several causes, including overturning the wrongful conviction of two men, challenging England’s onerous divorce laws and, of course, spiritualism, which put him at odds with the church, skeptics and even other spiritualists.

All this is as nothing compared to Conan Doyle’s greatest creation, that exemplar of cold logic and reasoning, Sherlock Holmes. Biographer Andrew Lycett, however, has done an admirable job of balancing the importance of Holmes, something Sir Arthur probably would have appreciated, but which might disappoint a Sherlockian. It’s easy to see, however, that the Canon represents only a small fraction of Conan Doyle’s output, despite how much Holmes looms large with the public.

The resulting portrait of Conan Doyle seemed quite understandable to me. I’d always wondered how someone who’d created the rational Holmes—“no ghosts need apply”—could be so gullible as to believe in faeries, automatic writing and ectoplasmic manifestations, but the deaths of so many so close to Conan Doyle (from disease and the Great War) and the burden left him by his creative but alcoholic, depressive and epileptic father, make his need to believe understandable. Conan Doyle was an outsize character who needed things to make sense, either by his own doing or by a power greater than himself. One of the byproducts of his own greatness was that singular creation, Sherlock Holmes.

Another byproduct of portraying this fascinating subject, coupled with the wealth of material Lycett was able to use following the deaths of several Doyle relations, is this somewhat daunting biography. It’s amazing how much we know about Conan Doyle, based on the many letters, journals and published works. Perhaps a less detailed biography would have made for easier reading, but even though I sometimes forgot who was who, I’m glad of Lycett’s thorough job.

Had to give up on this one. Even as audiobook, it could not hold my attention. Too much background info rather than giving us a feel of the person. After 3 CDs (out of 18) I gave up. I may look into another Fleming bio at some point, but this one is not for me.

I've been listening to this at bedtime for a couple of months. It's not an ideal way to read a new book, as each night I would have to figure out where I fell asleep the night before, and start over from there. The story of Thomas' life is not a happy one, as probably everyone knows. There are some parts of this bio that felt pretty judgmental to me- there are several times something gratuitous is added such as one character was introduced as homosexual, and then for no apparent reason we are given a précis of said character's partner's sexual kinks. The partner is otherwise not germane to the story, nor is the sexual orientation of the character.

The narrator is lovely. His accents are gorgeous. There were times, half-asleep, that I thought I was actually listening to Thomas.

Recommended for DT fans, but do yourself a favor and don't listen to it at bedtime.

Well, not read, completely. There is a lot of really good stuff here, but it is a very dense book with lots and lots of detail and I just can't seem to concentrate on it. I think I might be in a "no non-fiction" mood lately which doesn't bode well for the books I've got here right now from the public library. Besides this one I have one on Edgar Allan Poe and another on Lee Harvey Oswald. I'll give them all a chance but I really, really just want to read fiction right now.

I'm not rating this because I think my mood is affecting my response more than my like/dislike of the book. I'll keep it in mind and maybe go back to it when my tastes change back to wanting more variety.

This was a very comprehensive and readable biography. While knowing this point already, I was struck again by the fact that Sherlock Holmes represents a fairly small portion of his life and output, and not one that he initially rated highly, until its great success changed his attitude to some extent. That said, it felt like the Holmes stories were what he wrote to bring in the financial security to enable him to focus on the things about which he cared most, chiefly his evolving spiritualist beliefs and accompanying lecture tours, and his attempts at military history. The development of those beliefs in the supernatural is a theme running throughout the book, from his early attempts to reconcile his scientifically-rooted medical knowledge with his instinctive belief in a God (though not necessarily the Catholic God of his upbringing and schooling), to his more determined pursuit of spiritualism especially during and after the First World War. The (in)famous Cottingley fairies incident is dealt with quite briefly, though. Doyle emerges as a man of contradictions who wasn’t afraid to face ridicule or unpopularity. He was a man of science with a passionate and utterly sincerely held belief in life after death; he was an Empire loyalist staunchly supporting Britain in the Boer war, but who passionately supported the plight of the native Congolese suffering under Belgian rule; he was a man of fairly conventional political views but who supported victims of miscarriages of justice such as Oscar Slater and George Edalji.

This contains a very full genealogical table –unusual for a biography of a non-Royal/aristocratic subject – but there are a number of discrepancies between it and dates given in the text. It also includes an afterword detailing the sordid attempts by his children and other literary heirs to profit from his estate. 5/5

What I learned from this book: never get into a permanent relationship with an alcoholic poet!

First let me say, I did not finish this book. I was interested in Ian Fleming's role in WWII, how much espionage experience he had, and whether he really believed like his main character that women were simply toys to be used and discarded. So I read far enough to answer those questions. His role in Naval Intelligence was extensive, though at the administrative level. He had a very warped view of women and life in general, in my opinion. Now, I cannot blame the author of this book for my unwillingness to finish it, though I may say that I became bored with many of the tedious details and sidelights of people who came into the presence of Mr. Fleming. I think some readers would really enjoy that, especially if they are familiar with the personages of England in the early part of the last century. However, the life of Ian Fleming became very tedious to me. He was a user of people, self-centered and emotionally undeveloped as far as I can tell. Though I can accept that a man such as he could be fascinating to some, he's not to me and I'm not going to waste my time reading the rest of the book. I did find the chapters on the war years interesting though, and since that is why I bought it, I feel I've had my money's worth.