Peter Costello (1) (1946–)

Conan Doyle not only created the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, beloved sleuths of generations of mystery fans, but also enjoyed lending his aid to real criminal investigations. The author begins by presenting information on Doyle's life. Apparently the real man possessed some attributes of both detective team members, but his own success as a sleuth was not as great as that of his creations. The author devotes uneven attention to each crime which interested Doyle. I don't know if that is because Doyle spent different amounts of effort on the cases or because Costello's interested varied. The wide disparity in chapter lengths made it less readable. Perhaps the author should combine similar shorter cases into a single chapter? A bibliography for each chapter appears in the back of the book, but the author's not tying specific pieces to precise sources make it less valuable for academics although it still remains useful.… (lisätietoja)

Ulysses, a novel by James Joyce, is a literary peregrination of Dublin that takes place on one day, June 16 1904, during which a host of Dubliners, some invented and many who once existed, come within the cynosure of the Joycean Odysseus, Leopold Bloom. In the course of this day, now celebrated annually as Bloomsday, Leopold attends a funeral, makes an assignation, suffers cuckoldry, masturbates and, at the end of the day, rescues Stephen Daedalus, a younger version of Joyce, from an altercation in a brothel and brings him home to his Penelope, the unfaithful Molly Bloom. Peter Costello extends Bloomsday to the three score years and ten of Bloom’s life, from May 6th, 1866 to January 31st, 1937. It is, for the most part, a dutiful compilation and tedious elaboration of the information Joyce included in the vast cornucopia of Ulysses. Molly Bloom dies around the middle of Costello’s symbiont parasite of a novel, when Leopold’s afterlife begins. The tedium is unalleviated. To any external observer, Leopold is an Everyman, Anyman, an average man. Anyman, an accumulation of externalities, is boring. What made Bloom fascinating in Joyce’s Ulysses was the protean exuberance of his inner life. Costello, observing Leopold from the outside, drains the life from him. To be fair, his last few pages, on Bloom in his 70th and final year, do manage to evoke a sympathetic, obituary closure. An insufficient consolation, worth only a few stars as a literary curiosity.… (lisätietoja)

The subtitle of this book is misleading. Arthur Conan Doyle was not a real-life Sherlock Holmes. His fame as the creator of brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes led people to write to him about missing persons and other personal tragedies, and others to ask him for his opinion on headline crimes. In most cases, he didn’t investigate in the way that his character, Holmes, would investigate. He offered opinions. Sometimes his opinion was correct and sometimes it wasn’t. In some cases, it’s unknown whether he was right or not because the crime is still unsolved. The book seems randomly organized because the crimes are presented as Doyle became interested in them in his lifetime rather than in chronological order. The author does succeed in documenting Doyle’s lifelong interest in vindicating the wrongly accused, and it might be of use to readers or researchers with an interest in this topic.… (lisätietoja)