Since the day an impoverished Southsea doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle first put pen to paper and created Sherlock Holmes, the congenial detective has become acclaimed as one of the legendary figures in world literature.

Read from one side of the world to the other for nearly one hundred years, Holmes has attracted more detailed study and inquiry than perhaps any other single character in fiction and has also raised a band of enthusiasts whose numbers now run into millions.

Over the past century, the "Great Detective," as he is popularly known, has been the subject of countless articles, newspaper reports, memoirs, letters to the press, and illustrations -- not to mention libraries of books. These reflect not only the man, his cases, and his faithful assistant Dr. Watson, but also the people to whom he is not just a fictious character -- but a criminal investigator to be analyzed, explained, and compared. A far-ranging collection of such diverse material has been brought together in a unique souvenir of the making of a legend. Herein the reader will find some of the best, the most illuminating and frequently most amusing items to appear about the famous detective partnership.

The contributors include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his wife, Lady Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Frank Swinnerton, Edmund Pearson, Wyndham Lewis, Irving Wallace, Ronald Knox, and Christopher Morley.

The book will prove a delight to Sherlockian and general reader alike, mirroring as it does one of the most extraordinary literary phenomena of all time.