Letters to the Press

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes and as a storyteller of the first rank, but his interests went far wider and he was known in his day as a historian, social reformer, and man of action. This selection from the hundreds of letters which he wrote to the Press will reveal many unfamiliar facets of his character and an unexpectedly wide range of subjects. It includes correspondence from the national papers around the world and from many journals.

The letters show that Doyle was an energetic campaigner against injustice, as in his handling of the George Edalji and Oscar Slater cases, as well as being a well-informed polemicist on national and international issues. His other interests cover a vast range of topics, from vivisection to baseball, from ballistics to the use of the bicycle in warfare, from multiple reviewing to the Combermere Ghost, from the divorce law reform to the Channel tunnel.

This book follows Doyle's career from his days as a medical practitioner in Southsea, through his rise to fame as a leading novelist, and on to the political and spiritual concerns of his later years. The selection made by his bibliographers covers Doyle's entire working life from 1879 to 1930 and shed a fresh and absorbing light on the personality of the man and on the preoccupations of his time.