Today, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's place in the literary canon is secured by his series of detective stories featuring the idiosyncratic but brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes. However, Doyle's literary talents were wide-ranging, and he dabbled in many genres over the course of his career. The Firm of Girdlestone is a novel in the classic suspense tradition in which a greedy father-and-son team resort to terrible crimes to keep their floundering business afloat.