The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession

Do not miss this one. Period.

The author of this book, David Grann, is the author of Lost City of Z, one of my all-time favorite books. Grann isn't a novelist, but rather he writes wonderful essays, and has been featured in the New Yorker. So you should assume immediately that this book isn't going to be another Sherlock Holmes pastiche, because it's not. Instead, it's a book of essays, but don't let that put you off. It is absolutely delightful. Grann has this thing about people who are absolutely obsessed about what they do, a fact you already know if you've read his splendid Lost City of Z. In this book, he takes his readers on a journey through a dozen different profiles, all completely true, all dealing with different types of obsessions. You have to admire his ingenuity in picking such different cases, yet having them all tie together so wonderfully. Structured in three parts, all headed by quotations from various Sherlock Holmes stories, the first section is subtitled "Any Truth is Better Than Infinite Doubt." Here's the guy whose lifelong ambition was to write the ultimate and the definitive biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. After there was a dispute over some of Sir Arthur's papers, the subject of this essay was found dead under some murky circumstances. Was it murder or suicide? Then there's the incredibly sad and horrifying case of the Texas man who may or may not have set his own home on fire, killing his children, and who may have paid the ultimate price due to the zealousness of certain arson investigators. The third entry in this section is the odd story of a French man that reads along the lines of Tey's Brat Farrar or even the movie "The Changeling," leading into the strange account of a man who may or may not have been guilty of murder, based on a book he wrote. Finally, there's the story of a firefighter who lost all memory of what happened to him on 9/11 as his unit went into the towers before they collapsed. Part Two, entitled "A Strange...