A review by wmhenrymorris
Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography by Nick Rennison

What Rennison does here is both hilarious and at time a bit tedious -- he treats Sherlock Holmes and Watson and Mycroft as actual historical figures and, drawing from the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, actual historical events, and his imagination, he creates an entire backstory for Holme and co. The approach is seriously deadpan, but the writing is so fluid and academic that it mostly works. Obviously, the more you know about the Sherlock Holmes stories and about Victorian England, the more you'll get out of it, but I enjoyed even though I haven't read most of the Holmes stories for more than 20 year and my knowledge of history is fairly shallow.