It is also the direction taken throughout history by the adventurous, the curious, the solitary, and the foolhardy. Based in the North himself, Peter Davidson, in The Idea of North, explores the very concept of "north" through its many manifestations in painting, legend, and literature. Tracing a northbound route from rural England—whose mild climate keeps it from being truly northern—to the wind-shorn highlands of Scotland, then through Scandinavia and into the desolate, icebound Arctic Circle, Davidson takes the reader on a journey from the heart of society to its most far-flung outposts. But we never fully leave civilization behind; rather, it is our companion on his alluring ramble through the north in art and story. Davidson presents a north that is haunted by Moomintrolls and the ghosts of long-lost Arctic explorers but at the same time, somehow, home to the fragile beauty of a Baltic midsummer evening. He sets the Icelandic Sagas, Nabokov's snowy fictional kingdom of Zembla, and Hans Christian Andersen's cryptic, forbidding Snow Queen alongside the works of such artists as Eric Ravilious, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Andy Goldsworthy, demonstrating how each illuminates a different facet of humanity's relationship to the earth's most dangerous and austere terrain. Through the lens of Davidson's easy erudition and astonishing range of reference, we come to see that the north is more a goal than a place, receding always before us, just over the horizon, past the last town, off the edge of the map. True north may be unreachable, but The Idea of North brings intrepid readers closer than ever before.

    Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners, scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world transformed, and the rich outdid one another with ostentatious displays of wealth. Against this background, Marconi races against incredible odds and relentless skepticism to perfect his invention: the wireless, a prime catalyst for the emergence of the world we know today. Meanwhile, Crippen, “the kindest of men,” nearly commits the perfect crime. With his superb narrative skills, Erik Larson guides these parallel narratives toward a relentlessly suspenseful meeting on the waters of the North Atlantic. Along the way, he tells of a sad and tragic love affair that was described on the front pages of newspapers around the world, a chief inspector who found himself strangely sympathetic to the killer and his lover, and a driven and compelling inventor who transformed the way we communicate. Thunderstruck presents a vibrant portrait of an era of séances, science, and fog, inhabited by inventors, magicians, and Scotland Yard detectives, all presided over by the amiable and fun-loving Edward VII as the world slid inevitably toward the first great war of the twentieth century. Gripping from the first page, and rich with fascinating detail about the time, the people, and the new inventions that connect and divide us, Thunderstruck is splendid narrative history from a master of the form.

    A devoted admirer of the great detective, he had learned his craft by listening at the feet of Holmes himself. The Mystery of the Missing Twins was one of the strangest cases in Basil's career. He had only a few crumbs of clues with which to find solutions to such baffling questions as: Who had masterminded the plot? Where were the twins, Angela and Agatha, being kept?

     The case begins, as usual, at 221B Baker Street when Jonathan Thatcher, brother of acclaimed Mathematics professor, Aubrey Thatcher, reports that his brother has been missing for three days following the announcement of his engagement. The plot thickens when Jonathan reveals his brother is also embroiled in the murder of a clerk from the university. Holmes and Watson travel to Durham in search of Professor Thatcher, who withdrew five thousand pounds before his disappearance, perhaps to the Americas, and who also, after arriving in Durham, is found to have the murder weapon in his lodgings. In the second case a representative of the allusive Henri Victoire approaches the solicitor, Howard Montclair. Mr Montclair is instructed to deliver a sealed envelope to the Royal Hotel in Bristol by five o’clock for the faceless Victoire. After delivering the envelope to the hotel and meeting nobody, Montclair returns to London. Upon arriving back it is reported that the Brereton Emerald has been stolen from Rome. Rome, being the city where Montclair’s brother was stationed whilst working for the diplomatic corps. Only Sherlock Holmes can connect the delivery of a letter in Bristol to the robbery of one of the world’s largest jewels. In the final case, Holmes and Watson are called upon by Lestrade to help take down the Crimson Vandals who have been adorning British monarchs with lashings of red paint, leaving an undecipherable code in their wake. Holmes begins to make tracks, but not quickly enough as an attempt is made upon his life by the most unlikely of people – Dr John Watson. Roger Jaynes’ Sherlock Holmes: A Duel with the Devil is an exhilarating tale that pits two of the greatest minds against one another in a battle of intellectual wit – the game is afoot! Roger Jaynes has spent his entire life writing about a multitude of subjects in a variety of ways. As an award-winning sportswriter for the Miami Herald, Gannett News Service and the Milwaukee Journal, he was recipient of over 45 national writing awards including his being chosen as top ‘Sports News Writer of The Year’ in the United States by the Associated Press Sports Editors Association in 1977. After leaving journalism in 1988, Jaynes served as Director of Public Relations at Road America. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

    Acting as a British representative, Neil was tasked with negotiating and overcoming the countless culture clashes that existed between the two allies. From encountering unfamiliar planes and uncomfortable attitudes towards the British to meeting the King of Yugoslavia and General George Patton and falling in love, Neil's time with the Americans was anything but dull. As the Allies pushed east, Neil commandeered an abandoned Spitfire as his own personal aeroplane. Erasing any evidence of its provenance and stripping it down to bare metal, it became the RAF's only silver Spitfire. Love affair and culture clashes on hold, he took the silver Spitfire into battle alongside his US comrades until - with the war's end - he was forced to make a difficult decision. Faced with too many questions about the mysterious rogue fighter, he contemplated increasingly desperate measures to offload it, including bailing out mid-Channel. He eventually left the Spitfire at Worthy Down, never to be seen again. 'The Silver Spitfire' is the first-hand, gripping story of Neil's heroic experience as an RAF fighter pilot and his reminiscences with his very own personal Spitfire.

    Like his creation Sherlock Holmes, Doyle had "a horror of destroying documents," and until his death in 1930, they accumulated to vast amount throughout his house at Windlesham. They provide many of the words incorporated by Carr in this lively portrayal of Doyle's forays into politics, his infatuation with spiritualism, his literary ambitions, and dinner-table conversations with friends like H. G. Wells and King Edward VII. Carr, then, in a sense collaborates with his subject to unfold a colorful narrative that takes Doyle from his school days at Stonyhurst to Edinburgh University and a medical practice at Southsea, where he conceived the idea of wedding scientific study to criminal investigation in the fictive person of Sherlock Holmes. It also explores the private tragedy of Doyle's first marriage and long-delayed second as it follows him into the arena of public activity, propaganda, and literary output that would win him not only celebrity but also knighthood. 8 pages of black-and-white photographs are featured.

    For in vice-ridden Whitechapel, three female paupers of dubious morals have been murdered, their bodies hideously defiled. And in taunting letters their killer announces his intention to strike again—and signs his name "Jack the Ripper."As conceived by the award-winning mystery writer Michael Dibdin, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story is a brilliantly inventive updating of the Holmes legend. Pitting master detective against archfiend, steely rationalism against satanic depravity, Dibdin gives us a Holmes who is more complex, more human, and ultimately more fascinating than the one imagined by Arthur Conan Doyle. Here is a riveting combination of history and fiction that confirms Dibdin's reputation as one of the most imaginative and atmospheric crime writers now at work.(back cover)

    The extraordinarily wealthy 5th Duke of Portland had a mania for it, hiding in his carriage and building tunnels between buildings to avoid being seen. In 1897, an elderly widow asked the court to exhume the grave of her late father-in-law, T. C. Druce, under the suspicion that he’d led a double life as the 5th Duke. The eccentric duke, Anna Maria contended, had faked his death as Druce, and her son should inherit the Portland millions. Revealing a dark underbelly of Victorian society, Piu Marie Eatwell evokes an era when the rise of sensationalist media blurred every fact into fiction and when family secrets and fluid identities pushed class anxieties to new heights.

    . . .--Sherlock Holmes on Professor Moriarty in The Final ProblemThe Victorian era's most infamous thief, Adam Worth was the original Napoleon of crime. Suave, cunning Worth learned early that the best way to succeed was to steal. And steal he did.Following a strict code of honor, Worth won the respect of Victorian society. He also aroused its fear by becoming a chilling phantom, mingling undetected with the upper classes, whose valuables he brazenly stole. His most celebrated heist: Gainsborough's grand portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire--ancestor of Diana, Princess of Wales--a painting Worth adored and often slept with for twenty years.With a brilliant gang that included "Piano" Charley, a jewel thief, train robber, and playboy, and "the Scratch" Becker, master forger, Worth secretly ran operations from New York to London, Paris, and South Africa--until betrayal and a Pinkerton man finally brought him down.In a decadent age, Worth was an icon. His biography is a grand, dazzling tour into the gaslit underworld of the last century. . . and into the doomed genius of a criminal mastermind.

    The papers contained an extraordinary report of the case of Jack the Ripper and the horrible murders in the East End of London in 1888. The detective, of course, was the great Sherlock Holmes - but why was the report kept hidden for so long? This is the story that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote. It is a strange and frightening tale . . .

    But Canaris turned against the Fuhrer and the Nazi regime, believing that Hitler would start a war Germany could not win. In 1938 he was involved in an attempted coup, undermined by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In 1940 he sabotaged the German plan to invade England, and fed General Franco vital information that helped him keep Spain out of the war. For years he played a dangerous double game, desperately trying to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo. The SS chief, Heinrich Himmler became suspicious of the Abwehr and by 1944, when Abwehr personnel were involved in the attempted assassination of Hitler, he had the evidence to arrest Canaris himself. Canaris was executed a few weeks before the end of the war.

    BBC hit Sherlock has brought Conan Doyle's legendary detective to a whole new audience and Sherlock: The Casebook is The Great Game for the next generation. This is no ordinary guide. Each case is brought to life on the page and re-examined through Dr Watson's blog, Inspector Lestrade's police reports, newspaper articles about the crimes, Sherlock's detective notes and any other surviving clues from the cases. Interspersed amongst the evidence are exclusive interviews with the stars of the show, Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman and Rupert Graves, writers and co-creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat and the production team on everything from writing the scripts and bringing the characters to life on screen to set design and production. This is a multi-dimensional companion to Sherlock and a glorious tribute to the world-famous detective.

    It celebrates the great portrayers of Holmes on stage, screen, and television, and explains why Conan Doyle chose to kill his hero in one story, only to resurrect him nine years later.Where can you discover everything you always wanted to know about Sherlock Holmes? It's no mystery. Just crack open this book and start reading.

    Joseph Bell. Doyle often observed Bell identifying a patient's occupation, hometown, and ailments from the smallest details of dress, gait, and speech. Although Doyle was training to be a surgeon, he was meanwhile cultivating essential knowledge that would feed his literary dreams and help him develop the most iconic detective in fiction. Michael Sims traces the circuitous development of Conan Doyle as the father of the modern mystery, from his early days in Edinburgh surrounded by poverty and violence, through his escape to University (where he gained terrifying firsthand knowledge of poisons), leading to his own medical practice in 1882. Five hardworking years later--after Doyle's only modest success in both medicine and literature--Sherlock Holmes emerged in A Study in Scarlet. Sims deftly shows Holmes to be a product of Doyle's varied adventures in his personal and professional life, as well as built out of the traditions of Edgar Allan Poe, Émile Gaboriau, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens--not just a skillful translator of clues, but a veritable superhero of the mind in the tradition of Doyle's esteemed teacher.

    As an 'inspector' for Henry Marchmont's hugely successful weekly The Labouring Classes of London, his job is to investigate the notorious slum of Somers Town, near the new St Pancras Station, recording house by house the number of inhabitants, their occupations and standard of living. By mapping the streets in this way, Marchmont intends to show the world the stark realities of poverty in its greatest city. Befriended by Jo, a young coster, and his sister Roma, David comes to learn the slang of the hawkers and traders, sharpers and scavengers, magsmen and mobsmen, who throng the teeming byways of Somers Town. It is a place of Darwinian struggle for survival. And the deeper he penetrates the everyday squalor and destitution the more appalled he is by mounting evidence that someone is making a profit from people's suffering. A dinner at the Kensington home of his godfather Sir Martin Elder introduces him to Kitty, Elder's only daughter, and to a cabal of prominent citizens who have been plotting a radical solution to the problem of London's poor. David belatedly realises that a conspiracy is afoot. Passionate but reckless in his urge to uncover it he finds his life in danger, sustained only by the faithfulness of a friend and, ultimately, the love of a woman. In The Streets Anthony Quinn reconstructs an unforgettable picture of Victorian London, encompassing the extremes of privilege and privation, from the baronial mansions of the rich to the 'whited tombs' of the slums. With shocking poignancy and pin-sharp detail he brings to life a world of terrible degradation, yet one redeemed by dark comedy, profound fellow-feeling and the enduring possibility of love.