Shakespearean and Other Literary Investigations with the Master Sleuth (and Conan Doyle)

“… I have always been both impressed by and, to be frank, amazed at both the intellectual rigor and scholarly thoroughness with which Fleissner approaches his own particular case at hand. For as I have just observed, literary studies is itself a forensic field requiring incredible skills of observation, evidence gathering, and logical argumentation. Among the world’s foremost experts and practitioners to those sorts of skills is surely Bob Fleissner, I am happy to say….Fleissner’s methodology to leave no stone unturned in compiling the evidence for his arguments, his blending of a lifetime of reading and learning with critical and logical acumen of the both literary scholar/sleuth, and his absorption of the very essence of the tone and quality of writing style that one associates with Conan Doyle’s masterpieces of short fiction combine to make this collection one whose pages one will return to again and again in anticipation of that magical recompense, reserved for the devoted reader alone, of being both delighted and enlightened.” – Dr. Russell Elliott Murphy, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Table of contents (main headings):
Foreword
Preface by Russell Elliott Murphy
Part I: SH. and SH.H (Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes)
1. Conan Doyle and the Shakespeare Authorship Mystery
2. A Sherlockian Treatment of the Mystery of the Dedication to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Intro to a Pastiche)
3. Holmes and Shakespeare’s Second Most Famous Soliloquy: The Adventure of Hamlet’s Polluted Flesh (A Pastiche with Watson as First-Person Speaker)
4. Sherlock Holmes Inspects the Hamlet Specter (A Pastiche)
5. Conan Doyle as Literary Executor: Being the Brutus to Holmes’s Caesar
6. Dr. Moriarty, Mr. Holmes, and the Clues of Art: The Falstaff Connection
Part II: Transitional Shift to the Nineteenth Century
7. Chivalric Order: From Malory and Shakespeare to Tennyson and Doyle
Part III: Dickens and Stevenson
8. The Harvard Affair “Proves” a Holmes Connection with Edwin Drood
9. What has been Hyding?” Reconnoitering Dr. Jekyll and R. L. Stevenson (Via Doyle)
Part IV: The Holmesean T. S. Eliot
10. The Heart of Holmes: A Doyle-to-Eliot Transplant Operation
11. The Case of the Missing Lens: The Canonical Backdrop in The Cocktail Party
Part V: Onomastics Revisited
12. Name as Symbol: On Sherlock Holmes and the Nature of the Detective Story
13. On Spelling Out Holmes’s Secretive Initial
Part VI: Religion and Race
14. An Exegesis of Sherlock Holmes’s “Faith”
15. The Clerical Clue: Holmes and Harlem Again
Works Cited; Index