Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

In Victorian Britain, a medical man teams up with a tall, thin,
hawk-nosed acquaintance to solve a murder. The medical man narrating the
story is clearly in admiration of the extraordinary deductive powers of
his colleague, who describes his method as “a combination of
observation and inference; science and instinct. It is a science of
trifles.” Familiar ground for readers of detective fiction: Sherlock
Holmes and Dr. Watson.

But no: the two amateur detectives are historical personages.

The narrator is the man who was to give us the immortal sleuth of Baker
Street—Arthur Conan Doyle, here about to graduate in medicine. His
companion is the man after whom Holmes was modeled, Joseph Bell, a
professor whose impression on Doyle at the University of Edinburgh was

profound and long lasting. So obvious was the influence of Bell that
Robert Louis Stevenson (who makes a brief appearance in this
entertaining romp, as do George Budd and Prime Minister Disraeli) wrote
Doyle, upon reading some of the early Sherlock Holmes adventures, “Is
this my old friend Joe Bell?”

One need not know the Holmes canon to enjoy this well-written and
entertaining yarn. Howard Engel, best known for his wonderful Benny
Cooperman mysteries, has clearly done his research on the Edinburgh of
the time, the life of Doyle, and the 60 Holmes stories, and has given us
a delightful narrative in its own right.