St. Martin's Press

hobby in typically robust fashion. “It is as near to flying as any earth-bound man can come,” he informed the readers of the Strand, before boldly predicting that the time would come when “hundreds of Englishmen will go to Switzerland for the ‘ski’-ing season, in March and April

But later events were to magnify and dramatize the paradoxes implicit in Conan Doyle’s character from the time, in his early twenties, when he had begun to dabble in telepathy and other forms of non-verbal communication. It in no way detracts from his obvious and enduring achievements to note that, within thirty years, profilers of Doyle would be dealing with the problem of psychiatric imbalance.

When, in the summer of 1893, Conan Doyle happened to pick up a story by Guy de Maupassant with a plot broadly similar to one he had in mind, the coincidence struck him as a “spiritual interposition by a beneficient force” he conjectured to be his guardian angel, among a host of other such entities actively communicating with him