Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Joseph Bell

As a young medical student at Edinburgh, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took classes with the remarkable Dr. Joseph Bell in forensic medicine. Dr. Bell exhibited many of the characteristics that Doyle would later synthesize into the personage of Sherlock Holmes: complete faith in human reason, meticulous powers of observation, and encyclopedic knowledge of the activities and methods of the criminal classes.

As a young medical student, Arthur Conan Doyle - the creator of Sherlock Holmes - studied under the pioneering forensic investigator Dr. Joseph Bell. Critically acclaimed author David Pirie has created an engrossing series of novels that pairs the two as partners in criminal investigations in the dark underworlds of Victorian England. The Night Calls chronicles a most frightening and disturbing case: their encounter with the man who prefigures Holmes's arch-nemesis Moriarty.

In a literary tour de force worthy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, author David Pirie brings his rich familiarity with both the Doyle biography and the Sherlock Holmes canon to a mystifying Victorian tale of vengeance and villainy. The howling man on the heath, a gothic asylum, the walking dead, the legendary witch of Dunwich - perils lurk in every turn of the page throughout this ingenious novel, as increasingly bizarre encounters challenge the deductive powers of young Doyle and his mentor, the pioneering criminal investigator Dr. Joseph Bell.