Brigadier Gerard Stories

When Arthur Conan Doyle’s gallant French cavalryman Brigadier Gerard first appeared in print, the reading public was still reeling from the “death” of Conan Doyle’s most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, the previous year. What they found in Brigadier Gerard was someone very different from the intense, emotionless consulting detective: a courageous and skilled, but vain and emotional, soldier-adventurer in search of glory for himself and for France, devoted to his elderly mother and the Emperor Napoleon in the extreme, and witness to some of the greatest events in European history as he fought the men and wooed the women of countless countries during the Napoleonic Wars. The Gerard of these stories is aged and retired, but vividly recounts the grand adventures of his youth, weaving romance and adventure, conflict and cunning, and world-changing events of military and political history with the human drama of those caught up in a turbulent era of war. His tales are thrilling ones in which he—of course—plays the leading role.

In writing the Brigadier’s tales of his adventures, Conan Doyle brought to bear his own knowledge of Napoleonic history, informed by the insights on warfare he gained in South Africa during the Boer War. His interest in sport is displayed in the tales which touch upon boxing, fox-hunting, and cricket. His keen eye as a social observer is evident in a number of stories where the Brigadier’s misperceptions of English society, prejudices from his own French viewpoint, and errors from his limited perspective of some events, highlight the idiosyncrasies of English life in both the upper and lower classes during the late Georgian and Regency eras.

In the dozen and a half stories collected here, readers will experience the Napoleonic Era from a perspective very unlike that of War and Peace or other Napoleonic memoirs, histories, or works of fiction.