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The Origin and Development of Mr. Sherlock Holmes: "Arthur and Sherlock" by Michael Sims

Aired on Wednesday, January 25th.

"Come along now, Watson! The game is afoot!" On this edition of StudioTulsa, we're discussing none other than Sherlock Holmes with the writer and editor Michael Sims, who is the author of (among other books) "The Story of Charlotte's Web," which both The Washington Post and The Boston Globe chose as a Best Book of the Year. Sims speaks with us about his newest book, a nonfiction work entitled "Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes." As was noted of this book in The New York Times Book Review: "With all the brilliance of Sherlock himself...Sims' magnificent work of scholarship isn't a birth-to-death biography of Conan Doyle but a more specific investigation...[which] reads something like a superhero origin story.... Sims, the author of books on E.B. White and Henry Thoreau, is himself an ingenious investigator. Among his most intriguing explorations is his teasing out of not just Conan Doyle's personal history but the history of the detective story itself." And further, from a starred review in Kirkus: "Sims' story effectively retells the story of the young Doyle as something of a Holmes himself, someone who could persuade readers that 'seeming clairvoyance beyond the limits of direct knowledge was possible in the real world.' The author's deeply researched but reader-friendly take on Doyle and Holmes fits nicely along recent books by Michael Dirda and Barry Grant, and it stands, like Samuel Rosenberg's centrifugal book 'Naked Is the Best Disguise' (1974), as a work of literature all its own. Even the most learned of Baker Street Irregulars will enjoy Sims' look at the making of Sherlock Holmes."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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