

Rider Haggard’s bestseller King Solomon’s Mines, a tale of adventure in a lost world of its own. Verne’s visionary work took root in Conan Doyle’s mind, and at twenty-six, in 1885, so did H. Vingt milles lieues sous les mers by Jules Verne- Cinq semaines en ballon by Jules Verne.” I will tell you a few of them to see if you have ever seen them. Now he was at work on something new for him that harked back to his boyhood, when at age fourteen he’d told his mother: “I am trying to improve in my French and I have read a great many books in that language lately. By 1911 he was known also for historical novels like The White Company and Sir Nigel, about England’s Middle Ages for Brigadier Gerard, a picaresque series about the comical misadventures of one of Napoleon’s officers for stories based upon his own years of medical education and practice and more. Though universally known for Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle wrote much else in his lifetime.

‘That’s my foreword,’ declared Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, as he neared completion of his famous novel The Lost World in November 1911: ‘It will be more a boys book than any I have done.’īut it would be much more than that, becoming a favorite of many a man long after first discovering it as a book.
