chapter 3
sketchbook
HUFFINGTON 09.23.12
Sherlock, the
Prequel I
T’S SAFE TO SAY that most of us are familiar with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legacy, as the writer behind Sherlock Holmes. The onscreen Holmes revival we currently find ourselves in has featured not just Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch in the main role, but also Lucy Liu, who will play Dr. Watson in an upcoming CBS reboot. A new book, however, sets its sights at the start of Conan Doyle’s creative life, before there was Holmes. ‘Dangerous Work’: Diary of an Arctic Adventure, edited by Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower, makes public for the first time the sketch-filled journal Conan Doyle kept as ship surgeon on the Arctic whaler, the Hope. The future writer was only 20 years old and still a medical student at the time of the 1880 expedition, which proved to be a formative stint. Conan Doyle would later remark that he “went on board the whaler a big, straggling youth” and “came off it a powerful, well-grown man.” —Claire Fallon
SCROLL DOWN AND ROTATE IPAD TO VIEW NOTES AND SKETCHES FROM ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE’S ARCTIC DIARY, EXCERPTED FROM ‘DANGEROUS WORK’: DIARY OF AN ARCTIC ADVENTURE (UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS/BRITISH LIBRARY, TO BE RELEASED OCTOBER 2012).