The Valley of Fear - Couverture souple

Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on 22 May, 1859. He studied medicine in his home city but also started publishing short stories while a student. After practising as a ship's doctor and in Plymouth, he settled in Portsmouth as a GP. He returned to writing to bolster his income, having his first success with A Study in Scarlet in 1887, also his first work to feature Sherlock Holmes, modelled on a former university professor. Conan Doyle found the runaway popular success of this character a hindrance to his desire to write more serious historical novels thereafter, however, and famously killed him off before yielding to public demand to continue writing Holmes stories. His other fiction includes some notable science fiction including The Lost World, historical novels and other mystery and crime stories. Conan Doyle also concerned himself with criminal justice, the Boer War and, after suffering from depression later in life, defending the Spiritualist religion. He died of a heart attack on 7 July, 1930.

The Valley of Fear is a Sherlock Holmes novel whose unusually wide sweep takes in the Victorian English countryside and the cut-throat world of noneteenth-century American frontier towns.