CUENTOS DEL RING

Although history remembers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the author was also an accomplished athlete and amateur boxer who saw boxing as the ultimate test of character and discipline. His authority in the "sweet science" was such that, in 1909, he was even invited to referee the historic heavyweight world championship between Jack Johnson and James Jeffries. This passion is channeled into Tales from the Ring, an anthology that brings to light four masterful stories where technique, honor, and history intertwine both inside and outside the ring. Here, readers will find everything from the social realism of The Croxley Master (1899), in which a medical student faces off against a professional miner to pay for his education, to the supernatural in The Bully of Brocas Court (1921), a late work that pits the living against the specter of a former boxer. The volume is rounded out by two forays into the Regency era: The Lord of Falconbridge (1909), in which the legendary Tom Cribb trains a mysterious aristocrat, and The Disgrace of Lord Barrymore (1912), a thriller where high-society disputes are settled under the codes of old-fashioned bare-knuckle boxing. With the same narrative mastery that brought him worldwide fame, Conan Doyle transports us in these pages to the golden age of boxing, demonstrating that courage and intelligence are the ultimate weapons both in literature and on the canvas.