Playing with Fire The Weird Tales of Arthur Conan Doyle

Tales of weird and supernatural suspense from Arthur Conan Doyle, the author best known for the creation of the illustrious detective Sherlock Holmes. The next addition to the Hardback Classics series, with previous titles collecting the works of Sheridan le Fanu, Margaret Oliphant and M.R. James.

The luminous fog drifted slowly off the table and wavered and flickered across the room. There in the farther and darkest corner it gathered and glowed, hardening down into a shining core…

Although best known for the stories of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a remarkable number of weird and supernatural tales. Pulling at this thread of his fiction reveals a writer deeply fascinated in matters of the occult, the uncanny and the unexplainable, with his belief in spiritualism later in life only adding to his passion for the unknown.

This volume collects Doyle’s most enduring strange stories – ranging from monster encounters and deadly hauntings to dark tales of mesmerism – and also includes a new introduction along with Doyle’s never-before-reprinted essay on his own spiritual experiences, "Stranger than Fiction."

Mike Ashley is the author and editor of more than one hundred books and one of the foremost historians of popular fiction with a specialism for rooting out rare short stories. His Tales of the Weird anthologies include Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories and Doorway to Dilemma: Bewildering Tales of Dark Fantasy.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a British writer, physician and spiritualist, world famous today as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Along with detective stories, he wrote numerous tales of historical events and fictional expeditions such as the influential novel of prehistoric discovery The Lost World.

Introduction vii
Stranger Than Fiction 1
The Captain of the ‘Polestar’ 11
The Winning Shot 39
John Barrington Cowles 79
De Profundis 109
The Parasite 121
The Story of the Brown Hand 173
Playing with Fire 191
The Leather Funnel 207
The Terror of Blue John Gap 223
How it Happened 243
The Horror of the Heights 249
The Bully of Brocas Court 269
Story Sources 285