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Wodehouse on Doyle

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The best book intro known to man. Pelham Grenville on Arthur Conan Doyle in Ballantine's 1975 edition of The Sign of the Four Bully Comics' reconstruction When I was starting out as a writer—this would be about the time Caxton invented the printing press—Conan Doyle was my hero. Others might revere Hardy and Meredith. I was a Doyle man, and I still am. Usually we tend to discard the idols of our youth as we grow older, but I have not had this experience with A.C.D. I thought him swell then, and I think him swell now. We were great friends in those days. our friendship interrupted only when I went to live in America. He was an enthusiastic cricketer-he could have played for any first-class county-and he used to have cricket weeks at his place in the country, to which I was nearly always invited. And after a day's cricket and a big dinner he and I would discuss literature. The odd thing was that though he could be expansive about his least known short stories - those in Round...