Among English writers, Kipling had been active for a few years, and he would probably get my vote. Legend has it that after Smith finished reading “A Scandal in Bohemia,” he rushed into the office of George Newnes, the magazine’s founder, to announce that he had discovered the greatest short-story writer since Poe. “Adventures in The Strand: Arthur Conan Doyle & The Strand Magazine” by Mike Ashley (British Library) It began: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.” Shortly afterward, though, the young author submitted a second story, a longish one that ran about 8,600 words. That third issue included Conan Doyle’s “The Voice of Science,” an inconsequential comedy of manners involving an early phonograph.
Ashley’s book surveys the nearly 40-year relationship between the writer and magazine, extending from the Strand’s third issue, dated March 1891, to the retirement in 1930 of its great editor, Herbert Greenhough Smith. The Strand was by far the most famous periodical of those years, and its most famous contributor was Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). The dust jacket of “ Adventures in the Strand,” his new book, describes Ashley as “one of the foremost historians of popular fiction,” which verges on understatement: In fact, no one alive knows more about British magazines published between roughly 18, a period so rich in genre fiction that it is sometimes called “the age of the storytellers.” Do we need still another book about Sherlock Holmes or his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle? Yes - at least, if it’s by that highfunctioning bibliographer Mike Ashley.
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