A Study In Southsea

Presenting A Study in Southsea (1987) by Geoffrey Stavert, published by Milestone Publications—a jaunty, well-buttoned promenade along the esplanade where a young doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle learned that patients are puzzling and puzzles are patients with better alibis. ISBN: 0903852926. Offered by the splendidly plain-spoken Crappy Old Books, this copy is graded Condition: Good—meaning the pages are trim, the binding steady, and the only mystery left unsolved is why seaside air makes ideas so deductive.

What’s inside? A genial dossier on Conan Doyle’s Southsea years—those brass-stethoscope days when the surgery was quiet, the rent was not, and fiction tapped politely at the door like a client with a curious case. Stavert walks the lanes and parlours, sifts the letters and ledgers, and generally proves that observation plus boredom equals literature if you live near a pier. Expect a civic cameo list of chemists, clubs, landlords, editors, and the occasional patient who arrives primarily to advance plot. The mood is part local history, part origin story, and exactly the right amount of pipe smoke.

Expect to find:

• Southsea as laboratory—where neat streets, sharper gossip, and the disciplined weather conspire to invent a certain consulting gentleman.

• Case notes of a young GP—fees few, anecdotes plentiful, and a growing suspicion that clues behave themselves better on a page than in a waiting room.

• The apprenticeship of detection—habits of looking, listening, and tidying facts until they confess.

• Literary footpaths—how modest articles grew into stories, and how stories politely demanded a resident logician with a violin.

About this particular copy: Good and honest—the pages are clean, the spine obliging, and the jacket presents as a respectable Victorian aunt. Full disclosure from the seaside evidence locker: there’s a mark on the cover, the remains of a sticker that someone peeled off with admirable persistence before deciding life is short. It will, by all accounts, come off with 20 minutes and some warm water should you wish to play conservator; equally, you may keep it as provenance—a tactile footnote to its prior adventures. We are not peeling further; the game, as Holmes says, is yours.

Buy it if you’ve ever:

• Suspected that great detectives are forged from quiet Tuesdays.

• Wanted the prequel that smells of salt, ink, and freshly swept surgery floors.

• Believed that local history is best when it accidentally invents a global icon.

• Enjoyed biographies that wear walking shoes rather than ceremonial robes.

Why Geoffrey Stavert? Because he has the archivist’s patience and the flâneur’s eye—he points, gently, until you see. Why Milestone Publications? Because they treat locality like a treasure map and give the X a proper caption. And why Crappy Old Books? Because behind the brazen sign sits a reliable trove of actually rather good volumes—like this Good copy—ready to escort you down the promenade between medicine and mystery.

In short: A Study in Southsea is the courteous, revealing prologue to a world of deductions—brisk, affectionate, and quietly illuminating. Delivered in Good condition from Crappy Old Books, complete with a small, optional puzzle on the cover: to soak, or not to soak.

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