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Personal Memories of Conan Doyle's Fiction Michael Dirda. On Conan Doyle, or, The Whole Art of Storytelling. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. xiv + 210 pp. Cloth $19.95
IT IS HARD TO CLASSIFY On Conan Doyle, the third volume in a writers-on-writers series published by Princeton University Press. The book is neither a critical nor a biographical study of its subject, though it provides a few critical and many biographical tidbits. It is also not quite a memoir of journalist Michael Dirda, though it primarily features fond memories of his childhood fascination with the Sherlock Holmes stories and his adult enjoyment of the Baker Street Irregulars.
Considering Conan Doyle's skillful use of narrators and even titles- The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), for example-to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, maybe it is...