This post is brought to you by Strange Detectives by G. W. Thomas. This collection of strange mysteries features Victorian crime-solvers like Dr. Drayk who figures out what a grizzly bear shot in Canada has to do with a body of a man who was never alive! He’s not alone. There are also stories about Edwardian sleuth Richard Delamare who solves four cases, one involving a magic stone and the ghost of a shapeshifter.
The Best Science Fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle was edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin Greenberg in 1981. Here are their picks for ACD’s best. I have not presented them in the order they appeared in the book but more chronologically by publication. I did this because I like to see how Artie progressed with his ideas rather than have them arranged by others. We shall see if we agree with their picks and what stories they left out.
I thought it would be interesting to forgo the usual Strand illos and only use those from the French magazines like Dimanche Illustre. In some cases there are no illustrations from any country. Where necessary I have used the American ones. Thanks to The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia for the images.
One of the predominant artists found here is Georges Dutriac (1866-1958). He must have liked the works of ACD because he did eighty-one illustrations for his stories. Perhaps he also liked Science Fiction because he illustrated Jules Verne as well.
“The American’s Tale” (London Society, Christmas Number 1880) is a Science Fiction story by the old definition given by Clare Winger Harris in 1931: stories involving “Gigantic man-eating plants“. Doyle indulges in his fascination with America as well in this tale. Tom Scott is accused of killing Joe “Alabama” Hawkins after an argument in a bar. A lynch mob takes Tom to Flytrap Gulch to hang him but find the giant man-eating plant that got Joe.
“The Great Keinplatz Experiment” (Belgravia, July 1885 ) is an early story about body switching. Professor von Baumgarten and his assistant, Fritz von Hartmann, conduct an experiment where the soul leaves the body. Since this phenomenon lacks evidence, the professor gets the idea that if another person also leaves their body they will see the departing spirit. The two men return to their bodies only to find they have been switched. They repeat the experiment and switch their bodies back. They don’t tell anyone for fear of being sent to an asylum. This story appears after F. Anstey’s Vice Versa (1882). Doyle doesn’t use it for comedy as Mary Rogers will in Freaky Friday (1972). This story takes place in Germany, perhaps because of the popularity of Mesmerism. For more that, go here.
“The Los Amigos Fiasco” (The Idler, December 1892) is another tale set in America. Doyle takes on the new execution method of electrocution. Rotter Duncan Warner is zapped with six times the usual energy and does not die. He is shocked again, hung and even shot with bullets but will not succumb. He has become immortal. He is placed in prison for life. Doyle pokes fun at the American tendency to do everything bigger and better.
“The Great Brown-Pericord Motor” (Ludgate Weekly Magazine, March 5, 1892) has two American inventors create the first flying machine. (Doyle features America again, since many of the inventions changing the world came from that country. This is eleven years before the Wright Brothers and the Kittyhawk. That makes it SF.) Pericord learns that Brown has registered the patent in his name alone and they fight. Brown dies when he falls on a knife. Pericord places his body on the plane sends it off into the sky. He ends up in the nuthouse. It is interesting to compare this tale with “The Horror of the Heights”, another aviation tale in 1913, after airplanes have become a reality.
“The Terror of Blue John Gap” (The Strand Magazine, August 1910 ) has a man discover a monster that lives in a cave. I have written about this tale at length here.
“The Last Galley” (The London Magazine, November 1910 ) seems an odd choice for the label Science Fiction. The Carthaginians watch their last war galley return home then sunk in battle. Magro and Gisco discuss the end of Carthage and the eventual fall of Rome.
“Through the Veil” (The Strand Magazine, November 1910 ) is a dream story in which a man witnesses a terrible fire and a man attacking with a sword. Doyle suggests these things are from past lives. His devotion to Spiritualism is beginning to creep into his stories more by 1910. This is another weak SF idea though others would explore the idea in later stories like Nathan Schachner’s controversial “Ancestral Voice” (Astounding Stories, December 1933).
“The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” (The Strand Magazine, December 1910 ) begins with a holiday to Cornwall. There Holmes is brought into a case of the Tregennis family, the sister dead and two brothers insane. The incident is called the Devil’s work. This is a locked room Mystery with no one entering the room. Holmes finds the earthly solution in a poisonous substance placed in the fireplace. For more on Sherlock’s supernatural appearing cases, go here.
“The Horror of the Heights” (The Strand Magazine, November 1913 ) Frank D. McSherry, Waugh and Greenberg also did The Best Horror Stories of Arthur Conan Doyle (2005) and included this story and “The Lift” in both volumes. Aviators discover the upper atmosphere is inhabited by air serpents. Doyle was not the first to use the idea. I wrote about it at length here.
“Danger!” (The Strand Magazine, July 1914 ) falls into the SF category as a “Future War” story. A small unnamed European country takes on the mighty British Empire, not by attacking its larger navy, but by cutting off the food supplies that feed the country. Doyle may have written this tale as a warning to his fellow countrymen to employ more homegrown foodstuffs. World War I would begin a month later.
“The Lift” (The Strand Magazine, June 1922 ) is only an SF tale by the widest of margins. A young man, who survived the War because he gets premonitions of danger, takes his sweetheart up a lift in a tower despite a warning. The man who maintains the elevator is a religious zealot and decides to kill the passengers while he watches. Our hero saves the others, then watches the madman fall to his death.
“The Adventure of the Creeping Man” (The Strand Magazine, March 1923 ) is one my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories with a medical man injecting himself with monkey glands, turning himself into a monster. I wrote about this story at length here.
“When the World Screamed” (Liberty, February 25-March 3, 1928 and The Strand Magazine, April-May 1928) is one of two Challenger tales here. The previous three, The Lost World, The Poison Belt and The Land of Mist are all too long to be included in a collection as is The Maracot Deep (The Strand Magazine, October 1927-February 1928) which is SF but not Challenger. “When the World Screamed” has Challenger drilling into the Earth to prove the planet is a living thing. At the end, they hear a terrible scream. This idea may have inspired later SF tales like Jack Williamson’s “Born of the Sun” (Astounding Stories, March 1934).
“The Disintegration Machine” (The Strand Magazine, January 1929) is one of the earliest SF tales about transmat or matter transmission. Challenger and Malone investigate a Latvian named Nemor and his machine. (That name is awfully close to another!) Challenger even gets disintegrated and put back together, losing his hair. The issue comes from Nemor selling the machine to a foreign European government for use as a weapon. Challenger makes sure this can’t happen by disintegrating Nemor, putting politics ahead of Science. He even says a very unChallenger thing: “…We may make the matter worse if we experiment with the unknown. Perhaps it is better to leave matters as they are.” This is not the man who went to South America to find dinosaurs or bored us to death about Spiritualism in The Land of Mist.
Conclusion
Arriving at the end, we have only to consider the choices of inclusion and omission. My first impression is that there are far more Horror tales than SF tales in ACD’s catalogue. Many of these choices encroach on the spiritual rather than the scientific. That is partly the age in which Doyle lived. His work with Spiritualism may be seen more as a scientific exploration than a spiritual one. The only tale that strikes me as too much of a stretch for this book is “The Lift”, which I think was included because of its novelty. These stories have been collected and anthologized for most of a hundred years. As for stories they left out, I could not really find any. Most of the tales I enjoy are closer to Horror or Suspense and would be even farther from SF than those they selected. Doyle was an important early SF writer but his best works appear after 1912, making him not Victorian so much as an early 20th century writer simultaneous with Edgar Rice Burroughs, not H. G. Wells or Jules Verne.
Space Opera from RAGE m a c h i n e
Many thanks for this feature. There are at least two other collections of Doyle’s fantastic stories (whether one describes them as science fiction or horror) and I was glad to learn of a third one.