Welcome to all things Louise. This is the first blog post for a new web site dealing with Louise Conan Doyle as the true creator of Sherlock Holmes and actual author of each of the earliest (and best) of the adventures. Her story is finally told in Shadow Woman, now available in print format on Amazon.

Shadow Woman is the startling result of a thirty year investigation into the origin of Sherlock Holmes, one of the most compelling and mysterious figures in all literature. Taking advantage of research and analysis tools only recently available, Shadow Woman leaves little doubt that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle neither created Sherlock Holmes nor wrote the early adventures.

Early suspicions of Arthur’s authorship are revealed. Arthur’s ignorance of the many allusions buried in the adventures give him away. His penchant for fabrication explains his willingness to put his name to the work of another. His racist attitudes preclude him as Holmes’s creator.

The first Sherlock Holmes adventure was completed eight months after Arthur married Louise, as if it was a month premature. In the last of the early adventures, The Final Problem, Arthur travels to Switzerland (of all places) to face his own mortality just as Louise traveled to Switzerland to face hers. Louise took Sherlock with her and dropped him down the Reichenbach Falls in the grasp of her new creation, Professor Moriarty. Louise, clever person that she was, knew that Moriar is Latin for I die.

Victorian circumstance and collusion have for too long kept the reading public unaware of Louise as Arthur’s ghostwriter. In Shadow Woman, you will finally be able to meet the modest, incredibly brilliant woman who defied Victorian sensibilities and customs to create Sherlock Holmes and imbed within them arguments for the equality of all mankind.

And that’s not all. With Shadow Woman finally published, we will soon be publishing a new mystery series, not starring Sherlock Holmes, but rather the woman who created him. That is correct. Louise Conan Doyle will soon be starring in a new mystery series, the first of which, Brimstone, will quite soon be available on Amazon. The author’s note to Brimstone reads:

The story that follows is a work of fiction, or approximately so. In my nonfiction book Shadow Woman, I provide compelling evidence that Sherlock Holmes was created not by Arthur Conan Doyle, but rather by his first wife, Louise Conan Doyle née Hawkins. Universally ignored, dismissed, and disparaged by Arthur’s many biographers, Louise was in reality a kind, generous, and brilliant woman. We know little of her today because the documents that preserved her history were destroyed by Arthur’s second wife and family.

Georgina Doyle, the wife of Arthur’s brother’s son, began revealing Louise’s story in Out of The Shadows: The Untold Story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s First Family (2004). Even Ms. Doyle, though, failed to realize that Louise created Sherlock Holmes. In Shadow Woman, I continue Louise’s rehabilitation and I reveal, for the first time, that Holmes was born of her mind and her pen.

In this series, I add color to her narrative by having her solve one baffling mystery after another, both before and after she meets Arthur, even as she was writing the early Holmes adventures. Some details are based on fact, others on surmise. Most are pure fiction.

We will have much to talk about in this blog, and I will have many articles to post on this website. Please be patient with us as we get it all working. There are many surprises to come.