The Great Boer War - Arthur Conan Doyle

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Résumé :
The Great Boer War is Arthur Conan Doyle's authentic and thorough account of the conflict which gripped turn-of-the-century Britain. When the Boer War broke out in South Africa in 1899, Conan Doyle was already a hugely successful, middle-aged writer. Nevertheless, he was determined to see the war at first hand. Unable to secure a place as a regular soldier, he fell back on his medical training and was accepted by the British army as a doctor in a field hospital. Based in part on the first-hand accounts he received from wounded soldiers, Conan Doyle constructed a history of the war which he first published in 1900 and continued to edit and re-publish until the war ended in 1902. Documenting both the military campaign and the political background to the conflict, The Great Boer War is fascinating both as a piece of history and as a glimpse into another facet of the author most commonly known for his mystery stories.

Biographie:
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930) was a British writer best known for his detective fiction featuring the character Sherlock Holmes. Originally a physician, in 1887 he published A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels about Holmes and Dr. Watson. In addition, Doyle wrote over fifty short stories featuring the famous detective. The Sherlock Holmes stories are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. Doyle was a prolific writer; his non-Sherlockian works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels. One of Doyle's early short stories, J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement, helped to popularize the mystery of the Mary Celeste.

Sommaire:
Arthur Conan Doyle was a Scottish physician, novelist, short-story writer, and creator of Sherlock Holmes, one of the most enduring figures in world literature. Born in Edinburgh in 1859, Doyle trained in medicine before turning increasingly to fiction, where his background in observation, diagnosis, and rational analysis helped shape the methods of his famous detective. Beginning with A Study in Scarlet and continuing through the Holmes short stories published in The Strand Magazine, Doyle transformed the detective story into one of the defining popular genres of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Although he wrote historical novels, adventure fiction, science fiction, plays, essays, and spiritualist works, Doyle's reputation rests most securely on the Sherlock Holmes stories, with Dr. Watson's narrative voice, Holmes's disciplined reasoning, and the atmospheric world of Victorian and Edwardian London becoming central to classic mystery fiction. His influence reaches across detective fiction, crime writing, private investigator fiction, puzzle mysteries, radio, film, television, and modern popular culture. Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes stands among the major Holmes collections, preserving stories that helped establish the conventions of the traditional detective tale....