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
O'Connell infuses real events and people with fiction to make this clever, atmospheric and elegant chiller.
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.