cover image Sherlock Slept Here: Being a Brief History of the Singular Adventures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in America, with Some Observations Upon the

Sherlock Slept Here: Being a Brief History of the Singular Adventures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in America, with Some Observations Upon the

Howard Lachtman. Capra Press, $9.95 (174pp) ISBN 978-0-88496-227-4

Sherlock's creator Arthur Conan Doyle told an American audience that, while he was still a desk-bound medical practitioner, ""most of all I longed to travel to the United States.'' He eventually made four lecture tours of America, where he met Houdini and Herbert Hoover, was charmed by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and visited Kipling at his Vermont farm. Conan Doyle became an ardent baseball fan, resented ``being forced into virtue'' by Prohibition, and even named his famous detective after his Bostonian literary idol Oliver Wendell Holmes. Lachtman, a reviewer of mystery fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle, succeeds in establishing the American connection for Conan Doyle in both his travels and his written works. Instead of developing his research, however, Lachtman pads his skeletal facts with repetitious lecture and press conference scenes, thumbnail plot summaries which belie the involving density of the original stories, and even an entire tale (``The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor'')tacked on to the end. Despite its promising premise, all but the most devout Sherlockians may want to skip this one. November