The stories of Arthur Conan Doyle are so much more than merely Holmes and Watson. ACD was a master storyteller and he wrote many volumes beyond The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. (The Sherlock Holmes stories are brilliant, especially the early ones with a nice Gothic element in them. For all I have to say about Sherlock, go here. For more on one of my favorites, “The Creeping Man”, go here and “The Speckled Band”, go here.) Sprinkled among his tales are Horror and Science Fiction but even his non-fantastical ones are worth reading. What made the Holmes and Watson stories so great wasn’t all novelty. Especially as time wore on. It was Conan Doyle’s voice as a spinner of tales that keeps us reading. In the collections below you will find many stories have been left out or forgotten while others are used over and over. If you’d like them all, go here.
In the Science Fiction department, Doyle was in many ways H. G. Wells’s successor. As Wells veered off into politics and didactism, ACD himself was obsessing over Spiritualism. Despite this, he did write many important tales in the 1910s. Challenger and his crew went to The Lost World (1912), then survived The Poison Belt (1913) and eventually ended up talking about Spiritualism. (One of Science’s great betrayals, something Sherlock never did. No ghosts need apply!) ACD wrote of creatures in the Earth and others in the sky. For my Top Ten, go here.
The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales (1890) For more on the lead story, go here.
Strange Stories of Coincidence and Ghostly Adventure (1891) was largely taken from the second volume of a three volume anthology called Dreamland and Ghostland where Doyle appeared often anonymously or under a pen name. Due to the nature of the collection, these stories feature ghosts. This was years before Doyle converted to Spiritualism, so he treats them more tongue-in-cheek than you might expect. Vol1 Vol2 Vol3
The Gully of Bluemansdyke and Other Stories (1892)
The Tragedy of the Korosko (1898)
Strange Secrets (1899)
The Doings of Raffles Haw, and Other Stories (1891)
My Friend the Murderer and Other Mysteries and Adventures (1893)
Round the Red Lamp (1894)
The Mystery of Cloomber (1895)
The Green Flag and Other Stories (1900)
Round the Fire Stories (1908)
The Last Galley: Impressions and Tales (1911)
Danger! and Other Stories (1918)
The Dealings of Captain Sharkey (1919)
Five Favorites
“The Silver Hatchet” (London Society, Christmas 1883) recounts how a professor at a Hungarian university inherits a collection of weapons. Shortly after, gruesome murders take place. Only when two brilliant medical students stumble upon the silver hatchet in the snow does the solution present itself: the hatchet is haunted. Anyone who picks it up will murder his best friend! Doyle writes the first half like a Mystery but winds down into a supernatural tale.
“J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” (The Cornhill Magazine, January 1884) is a fascinating tale of a sea voyage and an explanation of what might have happened on the Marie Celeste. A doctor takes a voyage because his lung has developed a tumor. There he watches the machinations of Goring, a half-caste from New Orleans. The reader is not as naive as the observer, as the villain kills the captain, his wife and child then hijacks the ship to the coast of Africa. The narrator only survives because he lucked into possessing a stone ear that is the means of saving his life alone. One of Doyle’s finest tales, supernatural or not.
“The Case of Lady Sannox” (The Idler, November 1893) could have been a Holmes tale with a little different application but instead it is a fine example of a torture tale. (I am thinking of George Fielding Eliott’s “The Copper Bowl”, Weird Tales, December 1928.) The surgeon Douglas Stone is a man of great courage and skill but also has vices. He wants to met up with his mistress, a Lady Sannox but a caller comes to his home, begging for medical advice. The man is a Turk, who pours a bag of gold onto the table. Stone needs the money so he agrees to see the man’s wife. The Turk claims his wife has been nicked in the lip by a deadly poisoned dagger. Stone must cut her lip off or she will die. He almost doesn’t several times but finally cuts away the lip. Then the Turk reveals himself to be Lord Sannox and Stone has just mutilated his lover. Sannox laughs, revealing there was no poison only a moral need to tame his cheating wife.
“The Sealed Room” (The Strand, September 1898) has Alder, a young solicitor make the acquaintance of Stanniford when he has an accident with a cab. Alder takes the man into his house to recoup then goes looking for assistance. The house is large but empty and ill-repaired. He finds a room that has its lock sealed with wax. He later learns from Stanniford that his father ran away to Paris because it looked like some investments for friends were going to fail. The young Stanniford inherited the house after his mother died, but can’t sell it or rent it because of the sealed room. On his twenty-first birthday he can open the door. That is in two months’ time. Percival, the Stanniford’s clerk, fetches Adler two months later to be witness to opening the door. Now I could give a right good spoiler here and tell you what is in the sealed room, but I won’t. You’ll just have t read it to find out.
“The Leather Funnel” (McClure’s, November 1902 or The Strand, June 1903) has an Englishman visiting his French friend, Lionel Dacre, at his home in Paris. Dacre is a rich occultist. He asks his friend to sleep beside an old leather funnel to see if he will dream of the device’s origins. The Englishman notes some marks at the base of the funnel. He complies, lying the funnel beside his pillow. He has a vision of priests and a woman who defies them. She is strapped down and the funnel placed in her mouth. There are three buckets of water for the torture. The narrator wakes up screaming. Dacre awakens at the noise, then tells his friend what he knows. The woman was a famous poisoner who killed her father and brothers. The scoring on the funnel were her teeth marks.
As with many ACD stories, there are often UK and American editions with different illustrations. Doyle sold (or re-sold) well in America. The famous illustrator Sidney Paget, who did the Sherlock stories, was less known because Frederick Dorr Steele’ was the illustrator of the American versions.
Conclusion
These are early Conan Doyle but already he has a masterful grip on telling a tale. Take “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” for example. It is of equal quality with any of the first Sherlock tales. He also displays his ability with the “sea story”, which his friend, William Clark Russell was more famous for. Like “The Captain of the ‘Polestar'”, Doyle knows his way around a boat. And well, he should, having been a ship’s doctor before taking up a doomed practice in London. Thankfully, the poor business allowed him to write these stories.
There plenty of ghosts here too, but Doyle seems more interested in them as a writer than as a student of Spiritualism (which he wasn’t yet). It might be fun to do a post on the actual “ghost” stories of ACD and look at that in more detail.
Thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia for some of these images.
