When a young journalist, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, meets his writer hero Arthur Conan Doyle on a troop ship coming back from South Africa, he is delighted – especially when the creator of Sherlock Holmes suggests they collaborate on a ‘real creeper’ of a story.
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Reviews
A period-perfect exploration of ambition and resentment, ideal for a misty autumn night by the fireside
4/5 stars... A thrilling novella... Doyle himself becomes not a villain but a dark character bedevilled by a complex private life and his mania for spiritualism... A rip-roaring addition to the extended library of all things Holmes.
Engrossing... an eerie, pitch-perfect gothic tale, but it is also more than just a piece of literary archeology, probing questions of authorial ownership and fate and language in an atmospheric tour de force.
O'Connell infuses real events and people with fiction to make this clever, atmospheric and elegant chiller.