For the first time, the British Library is publishing The Narrative of John Smith ($15), which it acquired in 2004. Rather than solve The Case of the Missing Masterpiece, however, he wrote later, “I must in all honesty confess that my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again - in print.” Alas for Conan Doyle. Since the spirit communicated “in fluent English,” a language his mother had never spoken, Houdini remained unpersuaded.ģIn 1883, Conan Doyle mailed his first novel to a publisher - only to have it vanish en route. While originally friends, the two men fell out after Doyle’s wife claimed to channel Houdini’s mother. (No one collected.) “It takes a flimflammer to catch a flimflammer,” he said. After failed attempts to contact his mother via seances, Houdini became so incensed by charlatans that he offered $10,000 (about $420,000 today) to any medium who could create a physical manifestation that he couldn’t disprove.

But the magician was the one applying cold logic, while the creator of the world’s most famous detective believed wholeheartedly in spirits and fairies. The third is to be clever.’ ”ĢConan Doyle and Harry Houdini were on the front lines of spiritualism, writes Christopher Sandford in Masters of Mystery (Palgrave, $27). “ ‘The first requisite is to be intelligible. “Above all, he argues that good writing should follow three rules,” Dirda writes. Conan Doyle himself comes across as a thoroughly decent, loyal man with amazing reserves of energy and a storyteller’s instinct. He makes a compelling case for the value of the author’s supernatural, historical and science fiction - if not his treatises on spiritualism, which Conan Doyle valued more than his fiction. Dirda intertwines his experiences as a young fan and now a member of the Baker Street Irregulars with an erudite tour of Conan Doyle’s life and other writings. This fall features many new works on Arthur Conan Doyle and his most famous creation, including a lost novel by the author himself.ġWashington Post book critic Michael Dirda began a lifelong obsession one dark and stormy night: Hiding under the covers, fueled by Orange Crush and Cracker Jack, the fifth-grader opened “ The Hound of the Baskervilles,” he writes in On Conan Doyle (Princeton Univ.

King Arthur by Michael Holmes