Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on 22 May 1859 into an Irish Catholic family. His father, an artist and civil servant, struggled with alcoholism and was later institutionalized. Doyle was educated by Jesuits in England and Austria and then studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where one of his teachers, the surgeon Joseph Bell, impressed him with his ability to deduce a patient’s history from small details. As a student he served as a ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler, and after qualifying he sailed to West Africa on a steamer.

He set up a medical practice in Southsea, near Portsmouth, in 1882, and wrote to fill the time between patients. A Study in Scarlet (1887) introduced Sherlock Holmes, and the short stories that began in The Strand Magazine in 1891 made Holmes, and Doyle, world-famous. He resented the detective’s success, which he felt overshadowed his historical novels, and tried to kill him off in 1893, but he brought him back years later. He also wrote adventure fiction such as The Lost World (1912) and many shorter tales of terror and the uncanny, most of them for The Strand. He was knighted in 1902.

Doyle had been interested in psychic phenomena since the 1880s, and during and after the First World War, in which his son Kingsley was among the family members he lost, he became the best-known public champion of Spiritualism in the English-speaking world. He lectured on it internationally and wrote about it at length; he also publicly backed the authenticity of the Cottingley Fairies photographs. He died at his home in Sussex on 7 July 1930.

The three stories here are adventure-horror rather than ghost stories, and they show his gift for the plausible document. The Horror of the Heights (1913) is presented as a dead pilot’s notebook found in a field, written when flight itself was barely a decade old. The Terror of Blue John Gap (1910) is a doctor’s journal about something living in a Derbyshire cave. The Leather Funnel (1902) is a story of a dream and an object of torture in a Paris collector’s library. Start with “The Horror of the Heights.”