Before there was Sherlock Holmes, there was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Arthur Conan Doyle justly earned his place in literary history with his series of stories and novels chronicling the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In David Pirie's homage to the great author, Doyle's life has far more than a passing resemblance to that of the great detective. Still, what is less known is that Holmes was actually based on a friend of Doyle's, Dr. Joseph Bell. In The Dark Water, Doyle and Bell encounter a series of Victorian vagabonds and specters, from Thomas Neill Cream, a malicious criminal mastermind, to the Dunwich witch, a seventeenth-century legend that has taken on new life in a sleepy seaside town. The Dark Water displays Pirie's reverence for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Holmes canon as his characters deduce their way through a world familiar to any Holmes reader.