How long does it take to read The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?
The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by John Dickson Carr takes about 6 hours 21 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 21 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1949. 346 pages, about 95,150 words.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 34 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 21 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 58 minutes |
The page count is the median across 25 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
This vivid biography, written by John Dickson Carr, a giant in the field of mystery fiction, benefits from his full access to the archives of the eminent Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—to his notebooks, diaries, press clippings, and voluminous correspondence. Like his creation Sherlock Holmes, Doyle had "a horror of destroying documents," and until his death in 1930, they accumulated to vast amount throughout his house at Windlesham. They provide many of the words incorporated by Carr in this lively portrayal of Doyle's forays into politics, his infatuation with spiritualism, his literary ambitions, and dinner-table conversations with friends like H. G. Wells and King Edward VII. Carr, then, in a sense collaborates with his subject to unfold a colorful narrative that takes Doyle from his school days at Stonyhurst to Edinburgh University and a medical practice at Southsea, where he conceived the idea of wedding scientific study to criminal investigation in the fictive person of Sherlock Holmes. It also explores the private tragedy of Doyle's first marriage and long-delayed second as it follows him into the arena of public activity, propaganda, and literary output that would win him not only celebrity but also knighthood. 8 pages of black-and-white photographs are featured.
Subjects: Novelists, English, English Novelists, Physicians, Occultists, Spiritualists, Authors, Scottish
