I, Sherlock Holmes: Memoirs of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, OM, late consulting private detective-in-ordinary to their majesties Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and King George V

by Michael Harrison

In 1915, at the height of his career, Sherlock Holmes wrote his Memoirs and deposited the manuscript for safekeeping at the British Museum. Released by the Museum sixty years later, the manuscript has now been edited by the world’s leading authority on Holmes. To Dr Watson, Sherlock Holmes was the best and wisest man that Watson had ever known. But what was he really like—this man of modest birth who made himself the most famous private detective of all time, trusted agent, friend and confidant of the Great?

Here is the great sleuth’s own fearless analysis of his complex nature: his drug-taking; his ambitions; his reasons for not marrying; and his passion for the One Woman who would always be beyond his reach. The Memoirs are full of surprises even for confirmed Holmesians, revealing aspects of Holmes’s life that neither Dr Watson nor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were aware of. For instance, they show that the most powerful influence in shaping Homes’s career, by finding him illustrious clients, was the American financier William H. Vanderbilt.

But if the Memoirs take us into a world of wealth and power, there is another world with which Holmes became equally well acquainted: that raffish demimonde his half-dozen carefully contrived ‘other selves’ could penetrate without endangering the life—of reputation—of Sherlock Holmes. The adventures of these masquerade characters, ranging from ‘a groom out of livery’ to a female temperance campaigner, throw new and amusing light on Holmes’s ‘undercover’ activities.

Holmes touches only occasionally in these Memoirs on his actual methods of detection; he is concerned primarily with describing the world in which he flourished, and his place in it. Almost every great name in modern history up to World War I—in the United States as well as in the Old World—appears in the dramatis personae of Sherlock Holmes’s astonishing life.

(Publisher’s description)

Genres: Mystery

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Michael Harrison was the pen name of English detective fiction and fantasy author Maurice Desmond Rohan. Harrison published seventeen novels between 1934 and 1954, when he turned to writing detective fiction. He wrote pastiches of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, and was a noted Sherlock Holmes scholar.

Reviews

[ATM · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t say enough about this gem of a book.
I renewed it at least 4 times from the library. I kept re-reading whole chapters and just marveling at how uniquely written and endearing this memoir of a fictional character was. Absolutely brilliant!

[Ronn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've enjoyed much of Michael Harrison's writing. But this was very hard to read. While I believe that the writes much as Holmes would have written, Michael Harrison writing as Sherlock Holmes is just not as much fun as Arthur Conan-Doyle writing as John Watson.

[Jenna · Rating 2 out of 5]

More for the Sherlock Holmes "scholar" than one who just wants to read a novel about Holmes. Just wasn't quite in the mood for the more scholarly tome when I picked it up.