Who the heck is Solar Pons?

August Derleth: The Solar Pons Omnibus (1982)

August Derleth. The Solar Pons Omnibus. 2 vols. Ed. Basil Copper. Drawings by Frank Utpatel. Foreword by Robert Bloch. A Mycroft & Moran Book. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House Publishers, Inc., 1982.

The other day I ran across this strange pair of volumes in a local secondhand bookshop. Solar Pons? Who on earth could that be? I was, of course, familiar with the name of the author, August Derleth, from my extensive reading of the late H. P. Lovecraft, whose literary executor he was ... or claimed to be.

"Solar Pons", though ... "pons" is the Latin word for bridge, and "solar" for all things pertaining to the sun. Was the intention, perhaps, to suggest some kind of Bifrost-like bridge leading to enlightenment?

Richard Lancelyn Green, ed.: The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985)

"God said: Let Sherlock be! and all was light ..."
- John Masefield

But enough of this trifling. "Solar Pons" is an avatar of "Sherlock Holmes", as I knew already from a scatter of references here and there. He isn't included in Richard Lancelyn Green's classic anthology The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as that collection is confined solely to stories using the original names.

But then that was Derleth's original intention, too:

On hearing that Doyle did not plan to write more Sherlock Holmes stories, the young Derleth wrote to him, asking permission to take over the series. Doyle graciously declined, but Derleth, despite having never been to London, set about finding a name that was syllabically similar to "Sherlock Holmes," and wrote his first set of pastiches in 1928, which were published in The Dragnet Magazine in 1929.

- Wikipedia: Solar Pons

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Elementary (7 series: 2012-2019)

We've certainly become rather accustomed to updated film and television versions of Sherlock Holmes over the past couple of decades.

Sherlock (4 series: 2010-2017)

Sherlock Holmes (2 films: 2009 & 2011)

House, M.D. (8 series: 2004-2012)

And if you're tempted to query the presence of Dr. House in this grouping, what can one say of a man whose best friend is called "Wilson" (= Watson), and who's segued from a consulting detective to a consulting diagnostician? In any case, I've canvassed that subject extensively here.

Of the other three pictured above: Robert Downey Jr's steampunk version of Holmes; Benedict Cumberbatch's excessively cerebral, almost Alan Turing-like incarnation of the great man; and Jonny Lee Miller's New York-based junkie impersonation of the detective, I'm rather surprised to put on record here that at present it's Jonny Lee Miller who scoops the prize for me.

No doubt that has something to do with a serendipitous pairing with the dazzling Lucy Liu, definitely the most impressive Watson to date - so much better than Martin Freeman's petulant misery-guts, or even Jude Law's no-nonsense action man. In any case, for those of you who haven't seen it, Elementary is a very satisfying exercise in suspension of disbelief.

Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. (4 series: 1984-1994)

So what's next? Sherlock Holmes on ice? With an eventual total of 154 episodes, Jonny Lee Miller is now (according to Wikipedia) "the actor who has portrayed Sherlock Holmes the most times in television and/or film, overtaking Jeremy Brett (with 41 television episodes) and Eille Norwood (with 47 silent films)."

It may, however, interest you to know that Derleth wrote "more stories about Pons than Conan Doyle did about Holmes." Doyle wrote four novels and 56 short stories about Holmes, whereas Derleth wrote more than seventy stories (plus a couple of novels) about Pons.

August Derleth (1909-1971)

There are obvious similarities between the two. Pons lives at 7B Praed Street; Holmes at 221B Baker Street. Pons' companion in crime is called Dr. Parker; Holmes's Dr. Watson. Pons' landlady is Mrs. Johnson; Holmes's Mrs. Hudson. Pons' Inspector Jamison stands in for Holmes' Inspector Lestrade - et al. Each has a group of "Irregulars" who assist him in scouring the labyrinthine warrens of Old London Town ...

There are, however, significant differences as well. The Pons stories are set in the 1920s and 30s, starting just after the First World War. The Holmes stories are set some forty years earlier, in the twilight years of the Victorian era (with one significant flash-forward, in "His Last Bow," to a spot of espionage during WWI). Pons frequently mentions his "great predecessor," and even comments on the resemblance of some investigation or another to one conducted by Holmes himself.

Nor are the other characters precisely interchangeable. Dr. Parker is a far more peevish and irritable companion than Watson, and there is far less sniping at the official police in the Pons adventures. Nor is Mrs. Johnson's sang-froid at the goings-on of her unusual tenant nearly as tenuous as Mrs. Hudson's.

Pons lives in a rather more cushioned fantasy world than his progenitor Holmes. He also encounters other heroes of the time, such as Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu, Agatha Christie's Poirot, Somerset Maugham's Ashenden, and even Leslie Carteris's Saint on various occasions, which might have the deleterious effect of breaking the fourth wall, but which nevertheless provides innocent amusement to fans such as myself.

August Derleth: The Casebook of Solar Pons (1965)

But are the stories themselves any good? Well, that's debatable. They're surprisingly readable. Pons is seldom at a loss when it comes to solving the neat little puzzles that present themselves to him (more often than not by an attractive young lady who "instinctively" addresses herself to him despite the presence in the room of the gloomy Dr. Parker). He often repeats classical Holmesian adages such as "the game's afoot", and is seldom seen without a deerstalker - an item of clothing invented by Doyle's illustrators rather than by the author.

Here's a list of Derleth's original collections:

1. "In Re: Sherlock Holmes": The Adventures of Solar Pons (1945)
2. The Memoirs of Solar Pons (1951)
3. The Return of Solar Pons (1958)
4. The Reminiscences of Solar Pons (1961)
5. The Casebook of Solar Pons (1965)
6. A Praed Street Dossier (1968)
7. Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey (1968)
8. The Chronicles of Solar Pons (1973)

All of the stories in these books, including the novel Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey, are included in The Solar Pons Omnibus (1982), pictured above.

Basil Copper (1924-2013)

The story doesn't finish there, though - not by a long chalk. After Derleth's death in 1971, the character was revived by British horror and detective writer Basil Copper (author of Necropolis, among many other titles). He went on to write a further eight volumes of Solar Pons adventures, initially with the cooperation of Derleth's estate, but later on his own:

1. The Dossier of Solar Pons (1979)
2. The Further Adventures of Solar Pons (1979)
3. The Secret Files of Solar Pons (1979)
4. The Uncollected Cases of Solar Pons (1979)
5. The Exploits of Solar Pons (1993)
6. The Recollections of Solar Pons (1995)
7. Solar Pons Versus The Devil’s Claw (2004)
8. Solar Pons: The Final Cases (2005)

Most challenging of all to true believers, however, was his editing of The Solar Pons Omnibus. As well as breaking the continuity of Derleth's original volumes into approximate chronological order (as in William Baring-Gould's similarly controversial Annotated Sherlock Holmes), Copper, an Englishman, also "corrected" faults of orthography and idiom in the stories themselves! Not very assiduously, it must be said, given the number of solecisms they still include.

August Derleth: The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus Edition (2000)

As a result, The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus Edition was published in 2000 by Mycroft & Moran. It restores the original text as it was before Basil Copper's edits, and includes - as well as the six collections and one novel in order, the full text of A Praed Street Dossier (1968), as well as The Final Adventures of Solar Pons (1998).

To the 71 canonical stories by Derleth included in the 1982 Solar Pons Omnibus, then, one should add the following supplementary publications:

1. The Unpublished Solar Pons (1994)
2. The Final Adventures of Solar Pons (1998)
3. The Dragnet Solar Pons et al.: Original Pulp Magazine and Manuscript Versions (2011)
4. The Novels of Solar Pons: Terror Over London and Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey (2018)
5. The Apocrypha of Solar Pons (2018)
6. The Arrival of Solar Pons: Early Manuscripts and Pulp Magazine Appearances of the Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street (2023)

The last in the list (it should be stressed) is simply a revised and expanded version of The Dragnet Solar Pons.

So what is one to conclude from all this? That some people have far too much time on their hands? That the idea of fan fiction goes back far further in time than one might have supposed (as far back as Cervantes in the 17th century, at least ...) That the Transatlantic battles between American Sherlockians and English Holmesians now have their echo in the battle between these two warring omnibuses? (Or is the correct term omnibi? Basil Copper would know ...)

If you're curious to know more about Solar Pons and his adventures, I strongly recommend the website http://solarpons.com/, which is solely devoted to him. Its creator, Bob Byrne, who is clearly a pop culture fanatic after my own heart, has also written a good introductory article, "The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Solar Pons" (17/11/2014), on his blog Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature.

I certainly don't regret purchasing Basil Copper's handsomely bound and curated collection of the Solar Pons mysteries - not to mention the many happy hours I've spent poring over its contents. There are only 60 actual Holmes stories to read and re-read, after all, and even a somewhat watered-down version of his mythos such as this can be very entertaining.

I'm also trying very hard to tell myself that I don't need the (even rarer) Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus Edition, but if anyone has a copy for sale at a reasonable price, you could do worse than drop me a line in the comments section below ... There's no fool like a bibliophile, as the saying has it, and I have to plead guilty to the imputation.

August Derleth: In Re: Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of Solar Pons (1945)

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The Enigma of George Borrow

Henry Wyndham Phillips: George Borrow (1843)

The Works of George Borrow: Edited with Much Hitherto Unpublished Manuscript. Ed. Clement Shorter. Norwich Edition (limited to 775 copies). 16 vols. London: Constable & Co. Ltd. / New York: Gabriel Wells, 1923-24.

1. The Bible in Spain: or the Journey, Adventures, and Imprisonment of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula (1843)
2. The Bible in Spain [vol. 2]
3. Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest (1851)
4. Lavengro [vol. 2]
5. The Romany Rye (1857)
6. The Romany Rye [vol. 2]
7. The Songs of Scandinavia, and Other Poems & Ballads (1829)
8. The Songs of Scandinavia [vol. 2]
9. The Songs of Scandinavia [vol. 3]
10. The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies in Spain (1841)
11. Romano Lavo-Lil: A Wordbook of the Anglo-Romany Dialect (1874)
12. Wild Wales: Its People, Language and Scenery (1862)
13. Wild Wales [vol. 2]
14. Wild Wales [vol. 3]
15. Miscellanies [vol. 1]
16. Miscellanies [vol. 2]

Clement Shorter, ed.: The Works of George Borrow (16 vols: 1923-24)

Does this set of books remind you of anything? Probably not. After all, this is quite an unusual juxtaposition of authors - and texts:

Raymond Weaver, ed.: The Works of Herman Melville (16 vols: 1922-24)

The Works of Herman Melville. Ed. Raymond Weaver. 16 vols. London: Constable, 1922-24.

1. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846)
2. Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847)
3. Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849)
4. Mardi [vol. 2]
5. Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)
6. White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850)
7. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) [1]
8. Moby-Dick [vol. 2]
9. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852)
10. Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855)
11. The Piazza Tales (1856)
12. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857)
13. Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces (1924)
14. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876)
15. Clarel [vol. 2]
16. Poems (1924)

Same publisher. Same number of volumes. Roughly the same date of publication, and (at the time, at least), almost the same degree of obscurity.

Of course we now know that this same edition of Melville - the first to collect all of his disparate works (including "Billy Budd", published here for the first time) - would lead directly to the Melville revival, that swelling chorus of interest, appreciation, and (eventually) obsession which would culminate in crowning him one of the world's great authors.

I've written more about this process here.

George Borrow: Collected Works (1923-24)

But what of George Borrow? No such luck, I'm afraid. His mid-nineteenth-century vogue, based principally on that swashbuckling travel yarn The Bible in Spain (1843) - just as Melville's was on Typee (1846) - grew into something of a cult among readers of his distinctly less bestselling autobiographical novels Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857).

He even reached the level of being mocked and parodied by the frontrunner of a new wave of popular fiction writers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his 1913 short story "'Borrow'-ed Scenes":

"It cannot be done. People really would not stand it. I know because I have tried." — Extract from an unpublished paper upon George Borrow and his writings.

Thomas Derrick: Illustrations for "'Borrow'-ed Scenes" (1913)

Doyle's rather malicious story portrays the misadventures of a deluded fan who attempts to go about the countryside behaving like the semi-autobiographical protagonist of Borrow's books: accosting Gypsies with snatches of Romany, offering to fist-fight unruly tinkers, and attempting to impress barmaids with his high-flown patter.

E. J. Sullivan: Lavengro fights the Flaming Tinman (1900)

Naturally the results are not good. But then anyone who set out to cross America using the methods of Jack Kerouac's similarly semi-autobiographical spokesman "Sal Paradise" from On the Road would hardly fare much better ...

Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1958)

What then, in the Victorian era, seemed bizarre: the deliberate fabrication of a "travel persona" to act as your print protagonist, is now commonplace. The "Bruce Chatwin" or "Bill Bryson" of the travel books resemble only in part those actual individuals.

Travel literature, though it continues to be shelved under "non-fiction" in libraries and bookshops, has always contained a good deal of more-or-less true, or grotesquely exaggerated, or even downright invented material.

Augustus Burnham Shute: Illustration for Melville's Typee (1892)

Melville had the same problem with his own early works. People simply could not get it through their heads that his first book Typee was a novelised version of reality, not a direct transcript of events. So beguiled were they with the winsome Fayaway, from that far-off cannibal valley in the Marquesas Islands (as you can see from the illustration above, her appeal, in the buttoned-up United States of the mid-nineteenth century, is not so terribly hard to fathom), that Melville became, overnight, a kind of sex symbol.

The trouble was that whatever Melville was (and he himself never seemed quite sure), it certainly wasn't that. He was a very much stranger proposition: more of a forerunner of Kafka or Borges than an American avatar of Victor Hugo.

I've written quite a lot about Melville on this blog (and elsewhere): about his poetry; about the claims of Moby-Dick to be considered that mythical beast, the Great American Novel; also about the trials and tribulations of his principal biographer, Hershel Parker. However, I've never written about George Borrow before, despite my early exposure to his works in the form of the beguiling and bewildering Lavengro.

E. J. Sullivan: The Rommany chi (1900)

Why is that? I suppose because despite the obvious parallels between the two, the differences are perhaps even more striking. To put it simply, Borrow never wrote a Moby-Dick or a "Bartleby." Nor, unfortunately, do his posthumous papers appear to contain any lurking parallels to Billy Budd: just piles and piles of poems and ballads in translation.

His fanatical anti-Catholicism is a bit offputting, too - and there's something rather un-English about his boastful self-vaunting and his obvious pride in his own linguistic and literary accomplishments. One can't help feeling, though, that if he had written in a country more in need of literary heroes, as America certainly was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that he might have carved out more of a place in the pantheon for himself.

Melville too (dare one say it) has his faults. There's a laborious jocularity in many of his short stories, for instance, which robs them of their full effect. Even the very best of them, "Bartleby," is nearly ruined at the last minute by that add-on information about the "Dead Letter Office." Pierre may have been unjustly criticised at the time for its challenging theme of emotional incest, but even one of his greatest admirers, Hershel Parker, has taken it upon himself to "improve" it by removing the bitter middle section about Pierre's misadventures as an author:

Herman Melville: Pierre: The Kraken Edition, ed. Hershel Parker (1851 / 1995)

Borrow, let's state it plainly, is no Melville. He operates on a distinctly different plane than that. But his charms and accomplishments as an author are many.

Or so (at least) it appears to me. The wikipedia entry on his 1862 travel book Wild Wales describes his narrative voice as "distinctive and at times a little overbearing," and complains that he "never returned to deepen his knowledge and failed to cover the many parts of Wales he left out of this work." I suppose that few books cover the many things they were forced to leave out, when you really think about it.

George Borrow: Wild Wales (1862)

My suspicion that the author of this entry must be a disgruntled native Welshman is deepened by the following passage:

The author makes much of his self-taught ability to speak the Welsh language and how surprised the native Welsh people he meets and talks to are by both his linguistic abilities and his travels, education and personality, and also by his idiosyncratic pronunciation of their language.

I suspect I would feel much the same if I were forced to read the peregrinations of some Sassenach bigmouth through the Scottish Highlands, but since I have no such emotional link to Wales, I'm able to interpret this particular work as quite readable and charming. I can, however understand why this particular page has not one but two notices on it for "imprecise citations" and "importation of original research"!

Borrow, then, is definitely an acquired taste. I fear that I acquired it long ago, when I first picked up a copy of Lavengro in a local secondhand shop. Even now I can't look through its pages without having my spirits lifted: it seems so alive still.

You may not have the same experience, mind you. He is odd, a very eccentric (and egocentric) writer. But then I'm reliably informed that there are many who are impervious to the charms of Melville, too - who can't get past the first page of Moby-Dick, and don't see what all the fuss is about "Billy Budd." I defy them to say that of "Bartleby," though.

Bruce Robinson, dir.: Withnail and I (1987)

The experience of reading Borrow for the first time is (dare I say it) a little like that morning walk in the country taken by the eponymous hero of Withnail and I. As he ruefully concludes, the terrifying locals he encounters are not at all like the denizens of the H. E. Bates novel he's been reading. They're something stranger, darker - and funnier - altogether.

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John Thomas Borrow: George Borrow (c.1821-24)

George Henry Borrow
(1803-1881)

Collected Works:


1. The Works of George Borrow, Edited with Much Hitherto Unpublished Manuscript. Ed. Clement Shorter. Norwich Edition. No. 533 of 775. 16 vols. London: Constable & Co. Ltd. / New York: Gabriel Wells, 1923-24.
   1. The Bible in Spain: or the Journey, Adventures, and Imprisonment of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula (1843) [1]
   2. The Bible in Spain [2]
   3. Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest (1851) [1]
   4. Lavengro [2]
   5. The Romany Rye (1857) [1]
   6. The Romany Rye [2]
   7. The Songs of Scandinavia, and Other Poems and Ballads (1829) [1]
   8. The Songs of Scandinavia [2]
   9. The Songs of Scandinavia [3]
   10. The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies in Spain (1841)
   11. Romano Lavo-Lil: A Wordbook of the Anglo-Romany Dialect (1874)
   12. Wild Wales: Its People, Language and Scenery (1862) [1]
   13. Wild Wales [2]
   14. Wild Wales [3]
   15. Miscellanies [1]
   16. Miscellanies [2]

Books:


2. The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain. 1841. London: John Murray, 1908.
3. The Bible in Spain: or, The Journeys, Adventures, and Imprisonments of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula. 1843. Ed. Ulick Ralph Burke. London: John Murray, 1912.
4. Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest. 1851. Illustrated by Claude A. Shepperson. Introduction by Charles E. Beckett. London: The Gresham Publishing Co. Ltd., n.d.
   • Lavengro: The Classic Account of Gypsy Life in Nineteenth-Century Britain. 1851. Rev. ed. 1900. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1991.
5. The Romany Rye. 1857. The Nelson Classics. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd., n.d.
6. Wild Wales. 1862. Introduction by Brian Rhys. The Nelson Classics. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd., n.d.
7. Romano Lavo-Lil: A Wordbook of the Anglo-Romany Dialect (1874)

Translations:


8. Tales of the Wild and Wonderful (London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co., 1825)
9. Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian. Faustus, his Life, Death and Descent into Hell. 1791 (Norwich: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1825)
10. Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces (Norwich: S. Wilkin / London: John Taylor / Wightman and Cramp, 1826)
11. The Talisman: From the Russian of Alexander Pushkin, with Other Pieces (St Petersburg: Schulz and Beneze, 1835)
12. Targum, or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and Dialects (St Petersburg: Schulz and Beneze, 1835)
13. [with Stepan Vaciliyevich Lipovtsov] The Manchu New Testament (St Petersburg: The British and Foreign Bible Society, 1835)
14. The Gypsy Luke [Embéo e Majaró Lucas] (1837)
15. Wyn, Elis. The Sleeping Bard, or Visions of the World, Death and Hell. Translated from the Cambrian British (London: John Murray, 1860)
16. The Turkish Jester; or, The Pleasantries of Cogia Nasr Eddin Effendi. Translated from the Turkish (Ipswich: W. Webber, 1884)
17. Ewald, Johannes. The Death of Balder: From the Danish (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1889)
18. Translations. Ed. Thomas J. Wise. 42 vols (Privately Printed, 1913-14)
19. Ballads of All Nations: A Selection. 1826, 1835, 1913, 1923. Ed. R. Brimley Johnson from the Texts of Professor Herbert Wright (London: Alston Rivers Ltd., 1927)

Secondary:


20. Jenkins, Herbert. The Life of George Borrow: Compiled from Unpublished Official Documents. His Works, Correspondence, etc. London: John Murray,
21. Knapp, William I. Life, Writings, and Correspondence of George Borrow (1803-1881). Derived from Official and Other Authentic Sources. Vol. 1 of 2. London: John Murray, 1899. Internet Archive. Contributed by Harvard University Library. Web. 13 May 2020.
22. Knapp, William I. Life, Writings, and Correspondence of George Borrow (1803-1881). Derived from Official and Other Authentic Sources. Vol. 2 of 2. London: John Murray, 1899. Internet Archive. Contributed by Harvard University Library. Web. 13 May 2020.
23. Shorter, Clement. George Borrow and His Circle: Wherein May Be Found Many Interesting Unpublished Letters of Borrow and His Friends. London and New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913. Internet Archive. Contributed by Cornell University Library. Web. 13 May 2020.
24. Thomas, Edward. George Borrow, the Man and His Books. London: Chapman & Hall, 1912. Project Gutenberg. Web. 15 May 2020.
25. Williams, David. A World of His Own: The Double Life of George Borrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
26. Wise, Thomas J. A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow. London: Richard Clay & Sons, 1914. Internet Archive. Contributed by Cornell University Library. Web. 15 May 2020.

George Borrow: Collected Works (1923-24)

Classic Ghost Story Writers: Arthur Conan Doyle

The Conan Doyle Stories (1929)

Towards the end of his life, the vogue of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was still such that it made good commercial sense to collect his works in convenient omnibus form. First of all (of course) came Sherlock Holmes, with one volume (1928) for the five volumes of short stories and another (1929) for the four novels.

Next came the collected short stories (1929), then two volumes of 'historical romances' (1931 & 1932). Long after that, in the 1950s, came the Professor Challenger stories (The Lost World and its successors) and even an omnibus of Napoleonic Stories (though the latter overlaps considerably with the second volume of historical romances) - seven books in all, then, containing 16 novels and at least 11 volumes of short stories.

Arthur Conan Doyle: The Sherlock Holmes Short Stories (1928)

Sherlock Holmes was a rationalist, concerned only with what could be scientifically proven and deduced from the evidence. His creator was anything but. I've written elsewhere (here and here) about Charles Sturridge's wonderful film Fairy Tale (1997), which retells the strange story of the Cottingley Fairies.

Peter O'Toole as Conan Doyle (1997)

Peter O'Toole does an excellent job of impersonating the distinctly credulous but still (paradoxically) occasionally astute Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It becomes clear in the course of the action that it was the loss of his son Kingsley in the First World War - he died of influenza caught at the front two weeks before the armistice - that compels Doyle to continue his quest for communication beyond the veil.

This monstrous pall of loss hanging over the whole western world does explain, to some extent, the post-war growth of interest in spiritualism. The hitherto widely respected physicist Sir Oliver Lodge's book Raymond, or Life and Death (1916), about the séances he held to contact his own dead son, had an immense influence over other grieving parents, and Doyle gradually became their spokesman and standard-bearer.

Arthur Conan Doyle: The Land of Mist (1925-26)

Even the hard-headed Professor Challenger, the dinosaur hunter of The Lost World (1912), was pressed into service as a psychic investigator in Doyle's late novel The Land of Mist (1926). Sherlock Holmes must be said to have had a narrow escape in not being conscripted similarly - even in The Hound of Baskervilles, where all the spectral appearances turn out to have a distinctly rational explanation.

Arthur Conan Doyle: "The Story of the Brown Hand" (1899)

It's not really those stories I want to discuss here, though. It's the ones collected in those two sections of The Conan Doyle Stories entitled "Tales of Terror & Mystery" and "Tales of Twilight & the Unseen." These include such frequently anthologised classics as "The Brown Hand" and "The Brazilian Cat."

Arthur Conan Doyle: "The Story of the Brazilian Cat" (1898)

A great many of the others are equally memorable, though. For the most part they predate the period of his full-fledged involvement with Spiritualism, but it was already plain that he already had a strong affinity with the supernatural and mystical. Two stories that made a particular impression on me when I first read them as a boy were "The Terror of Blue John Gap" and "The Leather Funnel."

Arthur Conan Doyle: "The Terror of Blue John Gap" (1910)

The first of these is somewhat reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft's early story "The Beast in the Cave," written in 1904 (though not published until 1918). The fourteen-year-old Lovecraft could certainly not yet match the storytelling prowess of the immensely experienced Conan Doyle, but a comparison of the stories does offer some interesting reflections on what two different writers can do with not dissimilar material.

Arthur Conan Doyle: "The Leather Funnel" (1902)

"The Leather Funnel," by contrast, with its interest in psychometry and the sadistic excesses of the Inquisition, has an atmosphere of sadistic sexuality quite alien to Lovecraft but clearly quite attractive to Doyle.

[NB: It's worth stressing here the availability of these and other works by Doyle on the wonderfully comprehensive Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia website. You can find there both the texts and contemporary illustrations for all of the stories mentioned in this post.]

Arthur Conan Doyle: "Lot No. 249" (1892)

What else? There's a wonderfully vivid Egyptian-mummy-coming-to-life story in "Lot No. 249" - which predates by a decade Bram Stoker's classic Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). Nor did Doyle avoid conventional 'occultism' in his earlier stories. There's also a striking account of a séance going terribly wrong in "Playing with Fire," and a nice piece of automatic writing in "How It Happened" (1913).

Sidney Paget: Illustration for "Playing with Fire" (1900)

Need I go on? Doyle is, I think, at his best as a ghost story writer when he can combine aspects of his fascination with historical detail with nasty doings in the present. This is certainly the case in "The Leather Funnel," and also in "The New Catacomb" (1898), a neat variation on Poe's "Cask of Amontillado."

Not all of his work in this genre is included in the 1200 pages of The Conan Doyle Stories, however. A useful round-up of his unknown and uncollected pieces is provided by the late Richard Lancelyn Green's excellent The Unknown Conan Doyle: Uncollected Stories.

Uncollected Stories. Ed. John Michael Gibson & Richard Lancelyn Green (1982)

If it's Doyle's occultism that really interests you, though, you could do worse than try to find the recent (2013) Hesperus Press volume On the Unexplained, a selection from his late collection The Edge of the Unknown.

Arthur Conan Doyle: The Edge of the Unknown (1930)

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Arthur Conan Doyle (1914)

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
(1859-1930)

Fiction:


1. The Complete Sherlock Holmes Long Stories. 1929. London: John Murray, 1949.
   1. A Study in Scarlet (1887)
   2. The Sign of the Four (1890)
   3. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
   4. The Valley of Fear (1915)


2. The Conan Doyle Historical Romances. Volume 1 of 2. London: John Murray, 1931.
   1. Micah Clarke (1889)
   2. The White Company (1891)
   3. The Refugees (1893)
   4. Sir Nigel (1906)


3. The Mystery of Cloomber (1889)


4. The Firm of Girdlestone (1890)


5. Mysteries and Adventures (1890) [short stories]


6. The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales. 1890. London & New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1893. [short stories]


7. The Doings of Raffles Haw (1891)


8. The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. 1928. London: John Murray, 1949.
   1. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
   2. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894)
   3. The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905)
   4. His Last Bow (1917)
   5. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)


9. The Complete Napoleonic Stories. London: John Murray, 1956.
   1. The Great Shadow (1892)
   2. The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896)
   3. Uncle Bernac (1897)
   4. The Adventures of Gerard (1903)


10. The Gully of Bluemansdyke (1893) [short stories]


11. The Parasite (1894)


12. Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life (1894) [short stories]


13. The Stark Munro Letters (1895)


14. The Conan Doyle Historical Romances. Volume 2 of 2. London: John Murray, 1932.
    1. The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896)
    2. Rodney Stone (1896)
    3. Uncle Bernac (1897)
    4. The Adventures of Gerard (1903)


15. The Original Illustrated Arthur Conan Doyle. Castle Books. Secausus, New Jersey: Book Sales, Inc., 1980.
    1. The Tragedy of the Korosko (1898)


16. A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus (1899)


17. The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport (1900) [short stories]


18. Round the Fire Stories (1908) [short stories]


19. The Last Galley (1911) [short stories]


20. The Complete Professor Challenger Stories. 1952. London: John Murray, 1963.
    1. The Lost World (1912)
    2. The Poison Belt (1913)
    3. The Land of Mist (1926)
    4. "The Disintegration Machine" (1928)
    5. "When the World Screamed" (1929)


21. Danger! and Other Stories (1918) [short stories]


22. Three of Them (1923) [short stories]


23. The Conan Doyle Stories. 1929. London: John Murray, 1951.
    1. Tales of the Ring & the Camp
    2. Tales of Pirates & Blue Water
    3. Tales of Terror & Mystery
    4. Tales of Twilight & the Unseen
    5. Tales of Adventure & Medical Life
    6. Tales of Long Ago


24. The Maracot Deep. 1929. London: John Murray, 1961.


25. The Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Four Novels and the Fifty-Six Short Stories Complete, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Ed. William S. Baring-Gould. 2 vols. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967.


26. The Unknown Conan Doyle: Uncollected Stories. Ed. John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green. 1982. London: Secker & Warburg, 1983.


27. The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Richard Lancelyn Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.


28. A Study in Scarlet: Based on the Story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A Sherlock Holmes Murder Mystery. 1887. Webb & Bower (Publishers) Limited. 1983. London: Peerage Books, 1985.


29. The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: After Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Ed. Richard Lancelyn Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.


30. The Original Illustrated 'Strand' Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Facsimile Edition. 1989. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1990.


31. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 1: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes & The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Leslie S. Klinger. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2005.


32. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 2: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow & The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Leslie S. Klinger. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2005.


33. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 3: A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles & The Valley of Fear. Ed. Leslie S. Klinger. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2006.


Poetry:


34. Songs of Action (1898)


35. Songs of the Road (1911)


36. The Guards Came Through, and Other Poems (1919)


37. The Poems: Collected Edition. 1922. London: John Murray, 1928.


Non-fiction:


38. The Great Boer War (1900)


39. The War in South Africa – Its Cause and Conduct (1902)


40. Through the Magic Door (1907)


41. The Crime of the Congo (1909)


42. The Case of Oscar Slater (1912)


43. The German War: Some Sidelights and Reflections (1914)


44. A Visit to Three Fronts (1916)


45. The British Campaign in France and Flanders. 6 vols (1916–20)


46. Memories and Adventures (1924)


47. Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure (2012)


Spiritualism:


48. The New Revelation (1918)


49. A Full Report of a Lecture on Spiritualism Delivered by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the Connaught Hall, Worthing on Friday July 11th 1919 (1919)


50. The Vital Message (1919)


51. Our reply to the Cleric: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Lecture in Leicester, October 19th 1919 (1920)


52. Spiritualism and Rationalism (1920)


53. Verbatim Report of a Public Debate on 'The Truth of Spiritualism' between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph McCabe (1920)


54. The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921)


55. The Coming of the Fairies (1922)


56. The Case for Spirit Photography (1922)


57. Our American Adventure (1923)


58. Our Second American Adventure (1924)


59. The Spiritualist's Reader (1924)


60. The Early Christian Church and Modern Spiritualism (1925)


61. Psychic Experiences (1925)


62. The History of Spiritualism (1926)


63. Pheneas Speaks (1927)


64. A Word of Warning (1928)


65. What Does Spiritualism Actually Teach and Stand For? (1928)


66. The Roman Catholic Church: A Rejoinder (1929)


67. An Open Letter to Those of My Generation (1929)


68. Our African Winter (1929)


69. The Edge of the Unknown (1930)
    • On the Unexplained. London: Hesperus Press Limited, 2013.


70. The New Revelation (1997)


Secondary:


71. Baker, Michael. The Doyle Diary: The Last Great Conan Doyle Mystery. With a Holmesian Investigation into the Strange and Curious Case of Charles Altamont Doyle. London: Book Club Associates, 1978.


72. Baring-Gould, William S. Sherlock Holmes: A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective. 1962. London: Panther, 1975.


73. Carr, John Dickson. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 1949. London: Pan Books, 1953.


74. Edwards, Owen Dudley. The Quest for Sherlock Holmes: A Biographical Study of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.


75. Meyer, Nicholas. The Seven Per Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.. 1974. Coronet Books. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975.


76. Nordon, Pierre. Conan Doyle. 1964. Trans. Frances Partridge. London: John Murray, 1966.


77. Pearson, Hesketh. Conan Doyle: His Life and Art. 1943. Guild Books, 224. London: The British Publishers Guild, 1946.


78. Starrett, Vincent. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. 1960. Introduction by Michael Murphy. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1975.


79. Tracy, Jack. The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana or, A Universal Dictionary of the State of Knowledge of Sherlock Holmes and His Biographer, John H. Watson, M.D. 1977. New York: Avon, 1979.

Leslie S. Klinger, ed. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (3 vols: 2005-6)