By Arthur Conan-Doyle

Tales of Terror and Mystery:

Trapped by the strength of the public adoration of his character Sherlock Holmes, Conan-Doyle was desperate to write other works not involving the sleuth. The Tales of Terror and Mystery have all the recognisable qualities that made Conan-Doyle’s work so popular, the attention to gruesome detail the meticulous logic and the intricate and wittily bemusing plotting, yet they are free of the constraints put on Conan-Doyle by Mr Holmes.

These stories let loose the adventurous side of the rational and logical mind that many associate with Conan-Doyle - the side that pulled him away from his medical studies as a young man to the Arctic Circle on a whaling ship and more importantly the side that led him to a firm belief that grew throughout his life in the occult and the spiritual. His commitment to things psychic was so great that it is claimed he spent an estimated two hundred and fifty thousand pounds in the later years of his life on various occult causes.

The pioneer fascinated by advances in the technology of flight is released in The Horror of the Heights, with Doyle’s hero subjected to the hitherto unknown terrors of the upper layers of the atmosphere. The Leather Funnel allows his interest in the occult to surface. In The Case of Lady Sannox it is possible to see in the horrific judgement meted out to an adulterer the mind of a man trying very hard not to give into his own temptations in that direction, (Conan-Doyle spent much of the later part of his marriage to his first wife resisting a strong love for another woman.)

In the Tales of Mystery Conan-Doyle returns to more familiar territory with some beautiful intricacies of plot that need a fine and unusual method of deduction to solve. These tales have much in common with the various crusades that Conan-Doyle undertook in his life to solve what he perceived to be miscarriages of justice. He would often spot inconsistencies in the logic of a police case as reported and take it upon himself to clear the matter up, not always entirely successfully it has to be said.

These are a wily and complicated set of stories, with Conan-Doyle challenging the listener to unravel the mysteries before he gets to the last line - a challenge to which it is delightfully hard to rise.