In the autumn of 1888, the papers were full of London’s Whitechapel murders, the public’s imagination gripped by the mystery of Jack the Ripper. Arthur Conan Doyle’s first work featuring the detective-hero Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet, had already been printed as part of a Christmas annual the year before, but its 1888 publication as a novel could not have been better timed. The book tells a story of eerie murders in dingy corners of London, and appeared just as the vast newspaper-reading public had begun to speculate about Jack the Ripper.

And yet A Study in Scarlet did not sell well. Holmes would have to wait another three years to achieve international fame via the pages of the Strand Magazine. Meanwhile, as Lindsey Fitzharris stylishly demonstrates, there existed a real-life link between Holmes and the Ripper murders that was stranger than any fiction.

The protagonist of Sleuth-Hound is Joseph Bell, an Edinburgh surgeon whose deductive skills impressed his medical students and provided Conan Doyle – at one point, Bell’s clerk – with the inspiration for Holmes. At first sight, Fitzharris, whose previous books have also focused on brilliant surgeons, seems to be on