Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle’s first debut novel "The Narrative of John Smith" is going to be published for the first time in September, after 130 years of its original inscription.
The 150-page book is set to be published by Rachel Foss, lead curator of modern literary manuscripts at the British Library, this autumn.
British Library owns an extensive Conan Doyle collection and according to Foss the book has been part of the British Library’s Conan Doyle collection since 2007 until she realized it would make a good publishing project.
According to Foss,
As you might expect with the creator of Sherlock Holmes, there’s a bit of a mystery around the manuscript.
and provided about the manuscript,
He wrote it in 1883 and 1884, when he was starting to try to establish himself in the medical profession and as a writer. He sent it to a publisher, but it got lost in the post, so he decided to try and redo it from memory. The manuscript we have is the novel as reconstructed from memory, and it stops around chapter six.
The Narrative of John Smith was written when Conan Doyle was 23, and just a few years before the author published his first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet. It tells the story of a 50-year-old "opinionated Everyman" confined to his room by gout, laying out his thoughts and views on subjects from religion to war and literature through the conversations he has with his visitors, from a retired army major to a curate.
According to Jon Lellenberg, one of the book’s editors and a Conan Doyle expert,
What is interesting about it is not the story for its own sake but as a look inside the mind of this very young man — a struggling physician who is struggling even harder to become a published writer.
According to Stephen Fry,
The breadth, depth and scope of Conan Doyle’s knowledge and curiosity is often overlooked. He was the first popular writer to tell the wider reading public about narcotics, the Ku Klux Klan, the mafia, the Mormons, American crime gangs, corrupt union bosses and much else besides.
