SLEUTH-HOUND

From the bestselling author of The Butchering Art and The Facemaker comes the astonishing true story of Joseph Bell the Scottish surgeon whose extraordinary talent for detection inspired Sherlock HolmesEdinburgh 1878 A medical student squeezes into the Royal Infirmary s packed operating theatre eager to catch a glimpse of his celebrated professor a man whose uncanny powers of observation blur the line between diagnosis and detective work That man was Joseph Bell With a flair for the theatrical and an eye for clues hidden in the tiniest details Bell astonished his students with lightning fast deductions about his patients lives Though he considered his methods to be quite elementary they captured the imagination of his audience including his prized student a young Arthur Conan Doyle who would eventually abandon his medical career in order to create the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes In Sleuth hound award winning historian Lindsey Fitzharris guides us through the smog choked alleys and crowded slums of Victorian Edinburgh to recount the untold story of the man who inspired literature s most iconic sleuth Bell s talent was so formidable that he was called upon to investigate criminal cases and alongside Edinburgh s chief police surgeon worked on