He has been called a genius and a fraud, a hero and an addict, but who was Sherlock Holmes? With an attention to detail that would make his subject envious, Rennison gathers the clues of a life lived among the stars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—from Oscar Wilde to Sigmund Freud—and uncovers startling, previously unknown information. How did a Cambridge dropout and bit player on the London stage transform himself into a renowned consulting detective? Did he know the identity of Jack the Ripper? When did Holmes and his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, first cross paths? Did Sherlock Holmes, protector of the innocent, commit the very act he so often worked to prevent, the cold-blooded, premeditated murder of Moriarty?

Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography answers these questions and many more as it careens through the most infamous crimes and historic events of the Victorian age, all in pursuit of the real man behind the greatest detective in modern fiction—and, just perhaps, nonfiction.