The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales

It is strange to me Jock Calder of West Inch to feel that though now in the very centre of the nineteenth century I am but five-and-fifty years of age and though it is only once in a week perhaps that my wife can pluck out a little grey bristle from over my ear yet I have lived in a time when the thoughts and the ways of men were as different as though it were another planet from this.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was both a doctor and a believer in spirits, which may partly explain why his Sherlock Holmes is one of literature's most beloved detectives: Holmes always approaches his cases with the gentility and logic of a scientist, but the stories are suffused with an aura of the supernatural. Narrated by devoted assistant Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes's adventures were so addictive that fans protested the master deducer's "death" in 1893 and Doyle had to resurrect him.