The Coming of the Fairies

Best remembered for his creation of Sherlock Holmes, the world's first consulting detective and a dedicated adherent to logic, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in later life became fascinated by the occult. In this peculiar 1921 nonfiction work, Conan Doyle mounts a defense of the infamous "Cottingley Fairies," supposed photographic evidence produced by two Yorkshire girls in 1917. Though the photographers admitted in the 1980s that they had faked the fairies, at the time their "evidence" was embraced by a public fascinated by spiritualism... and stoked by such proponents as Conan Doyle. Though later considered an embarrassing misstep on the author's part, this artifact of the writer's bibliography remains an intriguing read, and essential for anyone looking to understand the fad for the occult in the early decades of the 20th century. Scottish surgeon and political activist SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (1859-1930) turned his passions into stories and novels, producing fiction and nonfiction works sometimes controversial (The Great Boer War, 1900), sometimes fanciful (The Lost World, 1912), and sometimes legendary (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892).