Gothic tales - Arthur Conan Doyle

'There was a rumour, too, that he was a devil-worshipper, or something of that sort, and also that he had the evil eye...'
Arthur Conan Doyle was the greatest genre writer Britain has ever produced.
Throughout a long writing career, he drew on his own medical background, his travels, and his increasing interest in spiritualism and the occult to produce a spectacular array of Gothic Tales. Many of Doyle's writings are recognised as the very greatest tales of terror. They range from hauntings in the polar wasteland to evil surgeons and malevolent jungle landscapes. This collection brings together over thirty of Conan Doyle's best Gothic Tales.
Darryl Jones's introduction discusses the contradictions in Conan Doyle's very public life - as a medical doctor who became obsessed with the spirit world, or a British imperialist drawn to support Irish Home Rule - and shows the ways in which these found articulation in that most anxious of all literary forms, the Gothic.

Darryl Jones is Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, where he has taught since 1994. He has held Visiting Professorships at Dartmouth College, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania, and Tongji University, Shanghai. He is the author or editor of over 10 books, including most recently the Oxford editions of the Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James and Horror Stories: Classic
Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson, as well as many articles on nineteenth-century and popular literature.

As always in the Oxford Worlds Classic's editions, there is an informative introduction and extensive notes... An interesting and informative essay, happily written without any lit-crit jargon, making it both accessible and enjoyable for the general reader... I loved this collection.

Leah Galbraith, FictionFan Blog

Superb introduction.

Christopher Metress, English Literature in Translation

[An] informative introduction a book that fans of Conan Doyle's other work will likely find enjoyable: Sherlock Holmes it may not be, but the strongest of the tales included in the volume show how versatile Conan Doyle's talents were in the realm of popular fiction.

Oliver Tearle, Interesting Literature

Shows there was more to Conan Doyle than Moriarty, Dr Watson and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Keith Richmond, ASLEF Journal

These Gothic Tales show Conan Doyle is the true master of the macabre and the gruesome.

Steve Craggs, Northern Echo

5*: Collected in a scholarly edition for the first time, these are 33 of Conan Doyle's finest Gothic short stories... Even if you have already read the tales in other volumes, it is worth buying this book for Jones's introduction alone: it explores the tensions and contrasts that defined the author's life, and how he articulated these themes in his work, offering the latest in literary criticism and historical research.

The Lady

This collection demonstrates still that Conan Doyle is still a master writer and... throws an interesting light on the career that wasnt Sherlock Holmes.

Nick Blackshaw, Starburst Magazine

Review from previous edition [A] beautifully designed edition

Times Literary Supplement