It’s a far cry from Sherlock Holmes, but this relatively
unknown series of stories by Arthur Conan Doyle was fantastic. It’s a story with so much depth, and so much
romance, its epitomizes Europe’s grand cataclysm…the Napoleonic Wars…in such a
way that you miss the honor and the glory of what war used to be. Of course, war was never like its portrayal
in novels…the pain and death and suffering and the sheer horror…that rarely
gets in the way of a good war story…but still, the panache always seems to hypnotize
the audience to the nasty reality of it all…
Arthur Conan Doyle does provide a nice blend…from the
horrors of the East, to the savage guerilla war in Spain, Doyle’s Gerard seems
to be everywhere throughout the expanse of a conflict that touches two
different centuries…and he glides through with élan as only a French hussar
can. Romanticism in its most raw form…
Still, I rocketed through this series…and enjoyed every page…right
down to the Emperor himself and an American by the name of Fulton trying to
hock his idea of a new-fangled naval weapon…the submarine. Here is the series as it appeared in serial
form, the true first editions so to speak.
I’ve put them in chronological order, or historical order, but you can
read them in the order Doyle wrote them if you wish…either way, it’s a highly
recommended FEF read…
A Foreign Office
Romance – 1894 (page 11)
Uncle Bernac
– 1897 (First U. S. Edition)
How the Brigadier
Slew the Fox (The Crime of the Brigadier) – 1900 (first
appeared in the U. S., then in the U.K. here)
There is also another option if you want to read this
series on your device…Amazon offers it for a very reasonable price… Brigadier Gerard:
The Complete Collection
And finally, if you were as intrigued as I with the background
of this wonderous work, (and the possible germ of Doyle’s ideas in creating and
writing about Étienne Gerard)…these two volumes might hold a bit of his literary
inspiration…