Book Review: The Sherlock Holmes Book

The Sherlock Holmes Book

DK Books, 352 pp., $25

"You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear."

The great consulting detective Sherlock Holmes tells this to his companion Dr. John Watson in the very first Holmes short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Scandal in Bohemia," published in The Strand Magazine in 1891.

You want to make things easier to see? To encourage, through visual clarity, practical observation? Then the graphic design long practiced in books published by Dorling Kindersley will be among your best gambits.

Of late, the esteemed house of DK has been releasing books that are more textual than pictorial (although no less beautifully designed and containing a wealth of images): The Business Book, The Religions Book, The Shakespeare Book, and so on. And now here's the latest in this series of "Big Ideas Simply Explained," concerning the popular Sherlock and his author and the adventures of both of them – real and imagined.

Fancy a rich parcel of biographical background on Doyle? Done. How about a story-by-story explication, complete with informative tangential sidebars, of the entire canon? Indeed. And you'd also like a consideration of the late-Victorian times in which the tales are set, and a guide to the fictional and real-life detectives that preceded Holmes – and the underpinnings of the methods they practiced? Splendid. And what of all those homages that have been created by others, the myriad expansions of the original mythos via books and movies and TV shows and plays and video games? Would you like an exploration of those as well? Sterling.

If that's the sort of thing you'll likely enjoy for years, especially when it's contained in a single well-bound volume that will add a literary elegance to your favorite coffee table ... then, my dear reader, you've come to the right place and the name of that place is The Sherlock Holmes Book.