"About to spring out upon my appalled senses, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe"'.
A dense yellow fog descends upon London. Tricksters, thieves and murderers stalk their prey undetected. Lawlessness abounds but it is no match for the penetrating mind of Sherlock Holmes as he investigates the strangest of cases. A woman receives a gruesome package - two human ears in a box. A vital government secret is threatened with exposure. Miss Brenda Tregennis is found scared to death - could she really have died from fright alone?...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 1930), best known as the author of Sherlock Holmes stories but also a devout spiritualist, was entirely convinced by a set of photographs apparently showing two young girls from Cottingley in Yorkshire playing with a group of tiny, translucent fairies. To demonstrate his unshakeable belief in the spirit world, he published The Coming of the Fairies in 1922. Doyle s book lays out the story of the photographs, their supposed provenance, and the implications of their existence. This quirky and fascinating book allows us to get inside the mind of an...

In The Lost World, the first in a series of books to feature the bold Professor Challenger--a character many critics consider one of the most finely drawn in science fiction--Challenger and his party embark on an expedition to a remote Amazonian plateau where, as the good professor puts it, "the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended" and numerous prehistoric creatures and ape-men have survived. "Just as Sherlock Holmes set the standard--and in some sense established the formula--for the detective story . . ., so too has The Lost World set the standard and the formula for...

Introduction by Anne Perry
Includes newly commissioned endnotes

In 1887, a young Arthur Conan Doyle published A Study in Scarlet, creating an international icon in the quick-witted sleuth Sherlock Holmes. In this very first Holmes mystery, the detective introduces himself to Dr. John H. Watson with the puzzling line "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive," and so begins Watson's, and the world's, fascination with this enigmatic character. In A Study in Scarlet, Doyle presents two equally perplexing mysteries for Holmes to solve: one a murder...

Best known as the creator of the consulting detective par excellence Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a man of wide-ranging interests and talents, and his literary output went far beyond his Holmes and Watson stories. The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Reader collects works from all the genres in which he wrote, including mysteries, historical adventure tales, science fiction stories, ghost stories, plays, memoirs, essays on spiritualism (in which he was a dedicated believer) and reports on the Boer War and World War I. This collection features the account of Watson's first...

Sportsman, doctor, historian and writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) created one of the most enduring - indeed, legendary - characters in English literature: Sherlock Holmes, the brilliantly observational denizen of 221B Baker Street. Conan Doyle was born of Irish parents in Edinburgh and educated partly in Great Britain and partly in Germany. He qualified as a medical doctor in Southsea, but the absence of both patients and revenue persuaded him, as he himself has related, to turn his daydreams into imaginative writings. The result was a true stroke of genius, the creation of the...