Tales of Terror and Mystery

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote many tales of horror and mystery besides his Sherlock Holmes stories, and this collection gathers thirteen of them. In 'The Horror of the Heights', a pilot climbing higher than anyone before discovers monstrous creatures living in the upper air; in 'The Terror of Blue John Gap', something huge lives in the caves of Derbyshire; 'The Leather Funnel' brings a dreamer back to a torture chamber of seventeenth-century France; and in 'The Lost Special', a whole train vanishes between two stations. There are also tales of a deadly Brazilian cat, a Jewish high priest's breastplate and a doctor's revenge.

Doyle published the collection in 1922, and its stories show his gift for building suspense from rational explanation. Holmes's own most frightening case is The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Doyle's adventure among dinosaurs is The Lost World.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was born in Edinburgh, trained as a doctor and wrote stories while waiting for patients at his practice in Southsea. Sherlock Holmes, modelled partly on his old teacher Joseph Bell, who could diagnose a patient's life at a glance, first appeared in 1887 and soon made Doyle one of the best-paid writers in the world.

He grew tired of his detective, killed him off in 1893 and was forced by his readers to bring him back. Doyle also wrote historical novels, the adventure The Lost World and campaigns for wrongly convicted men. Start with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles.