Nancy Timmins Books

While enjoying a six weeks' stay in fashionable Bath, the young and callow Catherine Morland is introduced to the delights of high society. Thanks to a new literary diet of the sensational and the macabre, Catherine travels to Northanger Abbey fully expecting to become embroiled in a Gothic adventure of intrigue and suspense – and, once there, soon begins to form the most gruesome and improbable theories about the exploits of its occupants. An early work, but published posthumously, Northanger Abbey is a parody of the Gothic genre typified by the novels of Ann Radcliffe, as well as a witty comedy of manners in the style of Jane Austen's later novels and, ultimately, an enchanting love story.

A Study in Scarlet, originally titled A Tangled Skein and published in 1887, was the first story to ever feature Detective Sherlock Homes and his trusty sidekick Watson. Written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in less than three weeks when he was 27, it would eventually become one of the most famous Holmes stories written, and was one of only four full-length novels starring the detective. A Study in Scarlet was also the first novel to feature a magnifying glass as a detective's tool.Scottish surgeon and political activist SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (1859-1930) turned his passions into stories and novels, producing fiction and nonfiction works sometimes controversial (The Great Boer War, 1900), sometimes fanciful (The Coming of the Fairies, 1922), and sometimes legendary (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892).