The best Arthur Conan Doyle books

Fred Saberhagen is another author that wrote a lot of really great books but no one really talks about him. I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes as a kid and was disappointed when I realized that I’d read all of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. I found a beat up copy of The Holmes-Dracula File in a used bookstore and I was hooked. The book is as advertised, Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula team up to solve a mystery. Just like Harry Harrison, Saberhagen also wrote a lot of books that cover the waterfront of speculative fiction. (If you want a good fantasy series The Book of Swords series is great.)  

I think that all of us have dreams of being a secret hero. The hero of this novel is not one by accident, but by effort and ability. The story follows his effort to do the right thing, using his self-deprecating humour to give us glimpses of the real person. The flawed supporter that he has is both so very powerful and yet so vulnerable, something that all of us can understand. The main characters determination to do the right thing even at the risk of great personal loss, is the kind of thing that most of us hope we could do too.

In this book, a murder takes place in a manor house just like in my novel, but during Christmas time. There is a connection to a diamond mine in South Africa, and how that played a part in the murder of the patriarch of the family. Detective Hercule Poirot has to delve into the family’s past to connect the dots and determine the motive and the identity of the killer. For those who like murders set during Christmas time, this is a novel for you.

This was one giant book I got as a gift and thought I’d never read, but when I started I couldn’t stop. These are old stories, and arguably the oldest I have ever read that ring true today. Holmes is like Thrawn, a mastermind, but he doesn’t rule Empires or command armies. Holmes works in isolation with only his trusted assistant Watson. He follows mysteries wherever they present themselves and is bored by anything else.

It’s the keen intellect that draws me to this book. The kind of stuff most people wouldn’t waste their time on because it goes over their heads. This is not the new Hollywood version of Holmes, this is much more potent. Older movies of Holmes do much better, but none match the caliber that is in these original stories. 

I can’t fully explain, but there is a magic to them that rejects the ‘mundane’ world… show more.

Master storyteller Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had a few things to say about Atlantis. In The Maracot Deep, young zoologist Cyrus Headley travels to the edge of a deep ocean trench with a team of explorers. Suddenly, a giant sea monster attacks them and hurls them down into the trench. The explorers are rescued by the survivors of the destroyed Atlantis, who have dwelled on the seafloor for the past 8,000 years. Will Headley and his companions ever return to the surface again, or will they remain trapped for the rest of their lives like the Atlanteans? Readers expecting this novel to be like his earlier Sherlock Holms stories are in for a surprise, as it explores the spiritual and occult ideas he pondered later in his life.

A true original. Arthur Conan Doyle working -to solve a series of grisly murders. Released in 1993, it sucked me in with the first paragraph.

It mixes genres and the historical with the fictional. There are Sherlock Holmes easter eggs everywhere, the idea being this thriller informed his writing. The characters, both good and evil, flesh out the great detective in a thriller-paced adventure.

You may not have heard of the author, but you definitely heard of one of his TV shows: Twin Peaks, which he created and wrote with David Lynch. While the TV show’s known for its quirkiness, it has a fantastic underlying mystery that drove the story. Much like Frost drives the story in The List of Seven.

The Victorians loved mummies and mummy stories... and before I read The Mummy’s Curse, I’d never heard of any of them! The nineteenth century’s obsession with Egypt and curses doesn’t get talked about much today. This book opened me up to a whole new world of stories, including some strange curse tales that never got quite as big as King Tut. (Which is a shame, because some of them are wonderfully creepy!)

Along with a complete reprinting of all the Sherlock Holmes stories, this is an incredibly well-researched account of the background from which they sprang. Leslie Klinger clarifies and defines many of the archaic terms and complex historical quirks which sometimes makes the initial reading of Sherlock Holmes difficult for newcomers to the Canon. He delineates the tales connection to the true crimes upon which Conan Doyle drew. It’s a bit like seeing an old, somewhat blurry photograph suddenly sharpened to give maximum impact. It’s simply necessary for anyone with a serious interest in Mr. Holmes.

M.M. Kaye set this novel before and after the Indian Mutiny of 1857. In it she describes the horrors British women and children go through being killed by the native population and the many ways the protagonist, along with some characters, escape being massacred. The descriptions are vivid and make you feel like you are part of the mutiny, experiencing it firsthand. The mutiny ends up being crushed and the British gain back power ruling India for another ninety years.

People who like novels set during the Victorian Era will certainly love this book as it takes place in Victorian England and then in India. So, one gets the best of both worlds. 

I know, this is a short story and hence cheating, but how can you make lists of detective stories without including the granddaddy of them all? Poe’s short story preceded Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes by four decades and has all the main ingredients. You have an ice-cold supremely rational detective, C. Auguste Dupin. You have a loyal sidekick. You have a bumbling cop. You have two extremely gory murders. You have a locked room. You have conflicting witnesses. You have a bizarre conclusion. You know what? Don’t read my No. 1. Read the Master first.

A beautiful classic. To me, this is perhaps the book that started it all—my passion for exploration, nature, planet Earth. Featuring a geologist and his nephew as its main characters, this book tells the story of the ultimate trip to the unknown and is filled with old-fashioned mystery, suspense, and thrill. Verne is the master of painting through words and instills a fervid curiosity in the reader as they are accompanied through a fantastical subterranean world filled with endless seas, primordial forests, and prehistoric creatures. Needless to say, this story is magical and a gold mine for the imagination of adventure-lovers. 

While Sherlock Holmes famously debunked anything that had even a vague whiff of the supernatural (looking at you, Hound of the Baskervilles), the same can’t be said for his creator. Entwistle offers a brilliantly imaginative take on what might have happened if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde teamed up to solve mysteries in a world where the supernatural was very, very real. Atmospheric touches ranging from fog-shrouded, gaslit streets to mysterious moors are the perfect complement to witty dialogue, and Entwistle manages to weave in a fair bit of historical detail despite the rip-roaring pace of the story. 

This is a surprise pick. It’s the first book about “real” fairies that I read. I was 15 years old when my local librarian showed me the book. The author was best known for creating the Sherlock Holmes series, and he wrote a book about fairies? 

The Cottingley fairies appear in a series of photographs taken by two young girls living in England in 1917. When the pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of the existence of fairies. Many people accepted the images as genuine; others believed they had been faked. This fascinating account of the “sightings” allows us to get inside the mind of a highly intelligent man who also happened to believe in fairies. But were the fairies real?

The heroine is soulless – the book certainly is not.

An admirably determined and courageous young lady holds her own in a steampunk version of 19th century London where werewolves and vampires play an important part in society – and everyone knows they exist.

They simply belong to the Victorian upper class and try to fit their species typical lifestyles into a world somewhere between Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Werewolves and vampires: what’s not to like?

This is the first book in a series that is as witty, complex, charming, and dark as Oscar Wilde himself. (“I can resist everything but temptation.”) The author is steeped in Wilde and his world, quotes him extensively (but appropriately) and also delivers a great mystery set in the fascinating era of Victorian decline and fin de siècle artistic fervor. Arthur Conan Doyle, in a great turnabout, plays “Watson” to Wilde’s “Sherlock” in all the mysteries. A later book in the series takes on Jack the Ripper, with some surprising suspects!

I admire chutzpah. Of all the authors who channel Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, and countless others, I admire Peter Heck the most. He takes on the Herculean task of matching historical humor with our national treasure Mark Twain. Oddly enough, his example gave me courage, or at least permission, to try something other than historical whodunits. I wrote book-length magic realism and am seeking a publisher.

Speaking of ancient hell hounds, where does the myth of the demon dog – you know, black, huge, gnashing jaws ravenous for human flesh, glowing red eyes, the most famous example being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles—come from? Hell hounds pop up in legends and stories from all over the world: Cerberus from Greek mythology; almost every single European country including Garmr from Norse mythology and ye fierce blacke dogges of English folklore; all over Latin America; China; Japan; India; Arabia; Russia; even the United States.

This account of a demon dog stalking English churches in the time of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I is the earliest account I’ve found in English. The full title is A straunge and terrible wunder wrought very late in the parish church of Bongay, a tovvn of no great distance from the citie of Norwich, namely the fourth of… show more.

If you love a rags-to-riches story, set in exotic lands, then this is a must-read book. It goes into detail about how European prospectors mine diamonds and build a business while facing a lot of challenges. Since a portion of my novel takes place in South Africa, it helped me with information on how life was during that period at the turn of the twentieth century. It is also a family saga spanning four generations, but most importantly focuses on the daughter of the man who goes to South Africa to mine diamonds, and the various challenges she faces from her family and enemies who want to destroy her.

Haycraft was an American commentator and this survey of the history of crime writing up to the Second World War is soundly written and sympathetic. Interestingly, he believed that the locked room puzzle was played out and that authors should avoid it, whereas this type of mystery has enjoyed a significant revival in recent years. Predicting how crime writing will evolve in the future is fraught with danger! Inevitably, Haycraft’s focus was mainly on American and British crime fiction. The limited number of translated mysteries in those days meant that the global reach of crime writing, and the achievements of authors whose first language is not English, has long been under-estimated. Only now is this problem being addressed.   

A Sherlock Holmes–themed bookshop located at 222 Baker Street in West London, Massachusetts, with an adjoining tea shop. That’s really all I need to say, isn’t it? But in this particular book in the series, our heroine, Gemma Doyle, heads across the pond to attend a Sherlock Holmes conference, and there were so many cups of tea being brewed that I couldn’t help grinning at how it seems to be the cure for every British ailment.