Backlisted - Round the Fire Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Happy Hallowe'en 2024! Join John, Andy and Nicky, plus guests Andrew Male and Dr Laura Varnam - AKA the Backlisted Irregulars - for this year's Hallowe'en special, celebrating Arthur Conan Doyle's "grotesque and terrible" Round the Fire Stories, first published in 1908. As he was the first to point out, there was much more to Conan Doyle than merely being the creator of Sherlock Holmes; he was a multifaceted and energetic man, a true force of human nature. In addition to being the quintessential 'ripping yarns', these tales of mystery and suspense reveal their author to us in ways he did not intend, from his anxiety about the colonial expansion of the British Empire to his obsessive determination to prove the existence of an afterlife. Please note: in this episode, there is an impromptu séance, much discussion of the immortal soul of 221B Baker Street, plus Andy's most terrifying quiz yet. Scared yet? You will be. This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at Foyles Charing Cross Road on 23rd October 2024. *For £100 off any Serious Readers HD Light and free UK delivery use the discount code: BACK at seriousreaders.com/backlisted *Tickets are now on sale for our LIVE show in London on Wednesday Sep 25th where we will be discussing The Parable of The Sower by Octavia Butler, with guests Salena Golden and Una McCormack * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of Backlisted is brought to you by Serious Readers, a reading lamp for people like you and me. Serious Readers. I've got one of these lamps and I think it's fantastic. Yeah, it's a great lamp for reading indoors. Perfect now the night's getting darker because it simulates daylight with its HD light. Which means you can read for hours and hours without any risk of eye strain. The great news is Serious Readers are giving Backlisted listeners £100 off any HD light and free UK delivery. Just go to SiriusReaders.com forward slash backlisted and use the discount code BACK.

That's SiriusReaders.com forward slash backlisted with the code BACK. And there's a 30-day risk-free trial so you can return the light after 30 days for free if you're unhappy with it which I very much doubt you will be. So without further ado lights out for the podcast. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us back at Falls in Charing Cross Road, the very first live recording of our ninth Halloween special. There are four of us on stage that you can see and hear, but a fifth may join us.

You have been warned. Expect spectral voices, ectoplasmic eruptions, Edwardian ejaculations, sealed rooms, gigantic hounds, Brazilian cats, Japan boxes, hot watches, and all manner of things, both impossible and improbable. I'm John Mitchinson, publisher of Unbound, where people pledge to support the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of the year of Reading Dangerously, and tonight we are delighted to welcome to Foyle's two returning guests, author of the year of Reading Dangerously, and tonight we are delighted to welcome to foil's two returning guests and friends of the show, our traditional diabolical double act, the backlisted irregulars, Andrew Mail and Laura Barnham.

Laura Barnham is the lecturer of Old and Middle English Literature at University College Oxford. She is an academic and poet and her poetry sequence, Grendel's Mother Bites Back, inspired by the old English epic Beowulf, as featured on a previous Halloween backlisted, was just published by Nine Anches Press in Primes, volume seven. And you were here with us a few months ago talking about Gawain and the Green Knights. Certainly was. I wonder how many people follow Laura on social media? Put your hands up if you do. Pretty healthy. Thank you very much. Could you explain to people who follow you on social media and to everybody listening to Batlisted why you are obsessed with Daphne du Maurier, old English literature and neighbours?

That is a very fair question. And probably honestly the answer is I've been interested in all of those things since I was tiny and I'm still tiny. Okay, that's fine. Narrative sophistication. Absolutely. Neighbours is a finely crafted soap. And almost as old now as Beowulf. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Okay, thank you for answering that. Well, last year I referred to, in my Emma James story, I referred to Laura as the tutor of terror, was it? The tutoress of terror and the headmistress of horror, I do believe. OK, well now the one for the teenagers, to give it this full Leonard Sacks reign. Please welcome to backlisted the didactician of deduction, the head teacher of the elementary school, the bestower of the Baker Street Baccalaureate, Laura Vaughan.

Thank you. And we're also joined tonight by Andrew Mail. Andrew currently writes about music, TV, films and books for Mojo. He also writes The Guardian and Sunday Times and he's the resident TV columnist for Sight and Sound. He has been on backlisted so many times we've lost count, even if he hasn't. How many times have you been on? Eleven, I think. Eleven. Are you our most regular guest now?

This is the record. Record guest. Amazing. This is the record. Yeah. Record guest. Amazing. Thank you, Andrew. Una did 10 last time, and Andrew's now broken it for 11. And Andrew is as much a fixture of Halloween as the dead themselves. We dig him up every year. In fact, we were talking about this, Andrew, weren't we?

How weird it is that the thing about Halloween is that as a society, on Halloween, on the 31st of October every year, we mock the dead. We dress up as the dead and we pretend to be the dead and we mock them. But then within a fortnight, perhaps spurred by remorse, we treat the dead with exaggerated respect. You know, you don't dress up as a Tommy to show your respect, your feelings for those who have passed. We go from pumpkins to poppies. We go from the risen to the fallen. We go from trick or treat to church parade. Or as Andrew has it, we go from trick-or-treat to church parade or as Andrew has it we go from Halloween to remembrance fun day God that makes you and me laugh in the pub

The spooky book we're here to summon from the spirit realm is, as I'm sure you all know, Arthur Conan Doyle's Round the Fire Stories, a collection of 17 tales, first published in the UK in 1908 by Smith Elder and Co. and in the same year in the US by McClure, and also released in a colonial edition by his George Bellen sons. We have that very edition. Well, obviously, it's not the only one they published, but one of those here today. Printed by William Clowes and Sons Ltd., London and Beckels, this edition is intended for circulation only in India and the British colonies.

This being Edwardian England, most all of these stories were published previously, in the 20 years previously, in The Strand magazine. Well, as well as his 24 novels, Conan Doyle wrote over 200 short stories, and they cover all manner of genres. And the ones gathered in the book we're here to talk about tonight, Round the Fire stories, some of them are spooky and appropriate to Halloween, some of them less so, but they are yarns. They are all, for them less so, but they are yarns. They are all, for one of the best phrase, ripping yarns. But to talk about the scary ones, it seemed useful, given that Andrew has been on every Halloween show we've made,

to just run through comparisons with some of the other writers of weird fiction that we've covered on Bat Listed, working on the Holmesian principle that when you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth. So Andrew, this is your ninth Halloween show. These stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, are they as terrifying as those of Robert Aitman? No. Are they as experimental as those of Shirley Jackson? No. Are they as elegant as those of Edith Wharton? No. Are they as idiosyncratic as those of Daphne du Maurier? Yes, I would say. Oh, well there you go. Well, that's that bit ruined. Sorry, everyone.

We'll do that again. Are they as idiosyncratic as those of Daphne du Maurier? No. Are they as original in their content as Beowulf? No. Are they as surprising as those of Elizabeth Jane Howard? No. Are they of the same literary quality as those of Henry James?

Clearly not. No. But they read better? Are they as good as those of MR James? Oh, now that is a good question. No. Why, sir, then have you gathered us here? I think one of the fascinating things about Arthur Conan Doyle and these stories is that

he was such a conflicted figure, divided self, writing about people between states and worlds, an intensely private man writing about locked rooms and hidden spaces. These stories are the ones that best express his anxieties, his uncertainties about empire, about spiritualism, about the occult, about colonialism, about the uncanny. We look to the Gothic and class as well. We look to the Gothic for a kind of emotional and intellectual hysteria where people kind of attempt to resolve or don't resolve things that they are kind of caught up in or uncertain about. And I think these are some of the best examples of some of the conflicted Edwardian colonial mind wrestling with issues that he is completely

and utterly uncertain about. Yes. I mean, in a nutshell, they are examples of a rationalist attempting to write about the irrational. A rationalist being pulled into the irrational because basically they're about his struggle to kind of reconcile the spirit world with his training in medicine and science. And they also account for, well Sherlock Holmes will come up later, but they account for his frustration with this character that he created, Sherlock Holmes, this scientific materialist who keeps pulling him back, yet he wants to write about the occult, he wants to write about ghosts, he wants to write about the unexplainable.

And these stories where all that stuff is happening. Okay, so before I turn to Laura, one last question for you as our resident expert in weird fiction. What is the effect on the stories of such a determined rationalist? It's utterly mixed that one of the things that happens is he doesn't always land the ending because a great ghost story or a great story of unease needs to leave you with that feeling of unease at the end. Like M.R. James says, there can be a loophole, but the loophole needs to be incredibly small,

that rational loophole. And sometimes with Conan Doyle, the loophole is too large because he himself is looking for the rational explanation. And any fan of a great ghost story or great horror story will know that to quote Robert Aikman, it's the mystery that remains. To leave a story with a sense of mysterious unease is where the power lies. So often you will have and we will talk about some of these stories tonight, stories that at their heart are utterly gripping and terrifying, and yet something is lost at the end when he's looking for a way to find a rational explanation.

I mean, my feeling was when they work, they really work. And when they go off the rails, they, no pun intended, as you'll see, they really do go off the rails. But I found them, Laura, I don't know, I found them completely fascinating. You know, one is so used to the canonical nature of Holmes, Watson, those types of story, those various catchphrases,

that to suddenly be given such a wide-ranging survey of that author's obsessions being played out in different forms was completely revelatory to me. Yeah, I was absolutely fascinated by them. I had no idea that Conan Doyle wrote supernatural and Gothic stories. I think Andrew's absolutely right that when it's when he loses his nerve, that's when they don't work. And there were moments as I was reading them and I kept thinking, oh, he's going to go there. Oh, I can't wait to see the kind of mystery that's going to be oh, and no, there is in

fact a rational explanation. It's a massive snake or it's a cat. And you think, oh, he just he lost his nerve at the end and he didn't he didn't take it there or stories where it resolves. And I just wanted to go, yeah, but couldn't the narrator then be haunted again by the thing that he's done? And he just and he just couldn't he couldn't take it there. And he has this thing that he's done. And he just couldn't take it there. And he has this thing that he says about Sherlock Holmes. And this is one of the ways in which I think Conan Doyle and Du Maurier have a really interesting kind of link, because both of them are writers

who've been incredible bestsellers. They're really proficient across multiple genres, but they're both haunted by particular characters. Du Maurier by Rebecca and Conan Doyle by Sherlock Holmes. And Conan Doyle said, I do not wish to be ungrateful to Holmes, who's been a good friend to me in many ways. If I have sometimes been inclined to weary of him, it is because his character admits of no light or shade.

And the ghost story has to kind of play in that space between light and shade. And it's when he just turns the spotlight too sharply on something that he's just kind of lost it. But you could almost imagine, I kind of felt like I was his editor sometimes. I was reading them thinking, oh, I'd have just sent him a note and just said, don't just don't explain that bit, leave that bit or maybe the lady in the Brazilian cat is actually the cat and she's metamorphosed. And, you know, I wanted to kind of push him more in the Jamesian direction, but he just didn't quite have the nerve to go there. And that's so fascinating. Don't think there was much editorial intervention

in those days, really. I mean, The Strand Magazine was, they pumped out stories every week. And also when you think how good Conan Doyle had been for The Strand, and how much money they made off him, and how much, you know, how- But it was money that brought Holmes back, really.

Absolutely, yeah. Towards the end of his life, certainly Arthur Conan Doyle developed a passionate belief in the afterlife. He considered himself to be a psychic investigator. He felt that he had proved his own satisfaction that the spirit lives on after the body dies. So it seems appropriate now that if we join hands here, please. Thank you. Spirit, are you there? Spirit, where did you get your ideas from?

With regard to Sherlock Holmes, I was, when I wrote it, a young doctor and had been educated in a very severe and critical medical school of thought, especially coming under the influence of Dr. Bell of Edinburgh, who had most remarkable powers of observation. He frightened himself that when he looked at a patient, he could tell not only their disease, but very often their occupation and place of residence. Reading some detective stories, I was struck by the fact that their results were obtained in nearly every case by chance. I thought I would try my hand at writing a story where the hero would treat crime as Dr. Bell treated disease and where science would take the place of

chance. The result was Sherlock Holmes. John, who did Arthur Conan Doyle's voice remind you of? It's someone we made an episode of Bat Listed about about a year ago. I don't know, I was really trying to place it. It sounded quite Scottish. It's Edinburgh isn't it? It's more Northumbria. Oh you mean Baselbunting. Yeah go back to the Baselbunting episode. That's an interesting Venn diagram, the Conan Doyle influence on Brig Flats. I wonder then before we talk about the first, we've each chosen one story to talk about from Round the Fire stories. I wonder if I could just ask you rather than say when did

you first read Conan Doyle, Laura, when did you first become aware of Holmes and Watson as a cultural thing? You don't have to have read it. It could be on TV, it could be on film or a Crackerjack sketch or whatever. Where did you first, where can you remember? Such a good question, because I think for me, Holmes and Watson have that kind of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, they're kind of out there in the ether. There's a kind of real answer from my adult life.

The kind of answer from my childhood might have been in some kind of 80s cartoon. Alvin and the Chipmunks had an episode inspired by Elementary, my dear Simon. So, yeah, probably something like that in the kind of those cartoons you watched in the 80s. But my real introduction to Holmes and Watson is from the amazing American TV show House M.D. with Hugh Laurie as Gregory House, who was inspired by Sherlock Holmes and his good buddy Dr. Wilson, who is Dr. Watson.

And I'm an enormous fan of House. And when I realized that show, the kind of detective medical show was based on Holmes and Watson, I think that's when I kind of dug into the stories and thought about, you know, kind of House's extreme rationality. Yeah, so I think that's it for me. Yeah.

Andrew, when, I mean, we are of a similar age, the three old gentlemen on stage. When do you first recall stumbling across Holmes and Watson? Well, I was going to say that it would have been Saturday morning TV or summer holiday TV in the 1980s. BBC Two, old black-and-white Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce films. But there is I think an earlier image that has no fixity of a basset hound wearing a deer stalker hat and smoking a Meerschaum pipe. But I don't know where that comes from. But I think it's like that those homsian images just were everywhere in childhood. But I think it was yeah, I think

it was Basil Rathbone was the first one I was really aware of. Well, apart from a very early erotic memory of a girl... Of a basic haired and learned. When I was about eight years old, who I was in love with at school, who wore a cape and a deerstalker hat, that sort of... that... leaving that aside. Was this a paid for education or on the state? Kind of sordid job going through. She was great. She was a model. Was this a paid for education or on the state? She was great. She was a model. She modeled for a free newspaper in Newcastle called The

Champion. And I just thought she was the most glamorous thing I'd ever seen. I was very young. Anyway, please don't say any more. There's a brilliant, I think brilliant, 1979 film called Murder by Decree, which had Christopher Plummer as Holmes and brilliant James Mason, the greatest Watson of all time. He's brilliant in it. And it's a mashup. It's Sherlock Holmes solving the Jack the Ripper murders. And I became completely obsessed with both Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper as a result

of that movie. I don't think it's that great a movie, but it had good acting in it. Frank Finley is the chief of police and that was my entry, Conan Doyle entry drug. I think, Andrew, I share with you a memory of watching in the school holidays, a season of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films, which are, of course, a kind of weirdly faithful and unfaithful rendering of the stories, both in terms of the characters of Holmes and Watson, but also the Second World War propaganda elements. He fights the Nazis in one of them, doesn't he? But as you've all been

talking, I actually think we've done such good work in the group. Group therapy. I think I have uncovered a buried memory of what must have been my first exposure to the Holmes milieu. And I'm pretty sure it was the phantom raspberry blower of old London town on the two Ronnies. Who remembers that? Yes. Yes. Who remembers that? Yes, yes. All the young people stick their hands in the air. It's such a fixture of comedy, light entertainment, musicals. It's deep in the culture, isn't it?

I suppose you'd call it a meme now, but the double act, the smart, impossibly clever, observant one with the kind of thing. But Sam and Frodo, it's a double act that runs through. It's a comedy double act, isn't it? It's Morecambe and Wise as well, as Holmes and Watson. I think I read the story. I don't know when. I think I would have been like 11, 12 when I read the stories and got the passion for the stories. How many of the home stories have you read, Laura?

I've not read that many at all. So I'd read, I had read Hound of the Brascovilles in a kind of du Maurier comparison for thinking about landscape and the moors and all kinds of Jamaica in kind of things. That's kind of, he doesn't like the landscape. He's got, he's really scared of the landscape. Has there been a Holmes subplot in Neighbours? I bet there has. It seems incredible if there hasn't.

I feel sure there must have been at some... Actually, there is a character at the moment, Holly Hoyland, who everyone's been comparing to Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. So actually, there is a kind of detective theme. Also, our whole output now is police procedurals, isn't it? I mean, it's like at all the BBC makes now. It's become the most popular form of popular entertainment. And I think kind of Holmes started that.

It's there in Colombo, looking more observantly. popular entertainment. And I think kind of Holmes started that. It's there in Colombo, looking more observantly. He even has the fatal flaw with the 7% solution. Yeah. Andrew, so Round the Fire stories then. These are published in 1908. And they're basically a collection of ripping yarns that had appeared in the Stram magazine in the previous 10 years, appealing to all readers of Sherlock Holmes, all readers of

Professor Challenger as well, The Lost World, the other great hit that Conan Doyle had. How much non-Holmesiania had you read before we tackled this? These are the first ones that I read. To my knowledge, I'm sure I would have read Conan Doyle short stories in collections of supernatural fiction. And what story from the collection did you choose that you wanted to say a bit about now? I've chosen Playing With Fire. It's the best one.

Yeah, it's the best one. And it's basically in... And it's properly spooky. It is a sceptic experience as a séance, is kind of the simplest way to put it. A dilettante man about town who says, anxious to be in the swim of every freshman movement, who now had a private pasque through the door of death. And the soothing atmosphere of the seance with its darkened lights was delightful to me. In a word, the thing amused me. And so I was

there. So it's someone who goes along for fun, for a laugh. So it's the best story. I think we all feel that, don't we? I thought it was terrific. First, what works? The sense of creeping dread, the way in which Doyle builds the growing sense of tension. This is basically this man who arrives is looking for the latest fashion. He's looking for a thrill. He's a thrill seeker and he's looking for a bit of fun and he does not believe. And then it's the way in which Conan Doyle just creates and piles on the atmosphere. It's very modern in a way. It's very kind of like a sort of a modern sort of horror film in the way in which that sort of sense of mood and atmosphere is created. There's just some of his best writing in there. Again, it doesn't land. If we've

got time, I'd quite like to read just a little bit about how Doyle kind of builds that sense of kind of creeping tension. Please read us apart from that and then we'll discuss why it doesn't land because I think that's very interesting as well. So we sat in silence and expected, staring out into the blackness in front of us. A clock ticked in the passage, a dog barked intermittently far away. Once or twice a cab rattled past in the street, and the gleam of its lamps through the chink in the curtains was a cheerful break in that gloomy vigil.

I felt these physical symptoms with which previous seances had made me familiar. The coldness of the feet, the tingling in the hands, the glow of the palms, the feeling of a cold wind upon the back. Strange little shooting pains came in my forearms, especially as it seemed to me in my left one, which was nearest to our visitor due no doubt to disturbance of the vascular system. But worthy of some attention all the same.

At the same time, I was conscious of a strained feeling of expectancy, which was almost painful. From the rigid, absolute silence of my companions, I gathered that their nerves were as tense as my own. Then suddenly, a sound came out of the darkness, a low sibilant sound, the quick, thin breathing of a woman. Quicker and thinner yet it came as between clenched teeth to end in a loud clasp with

a dull rustle of cloth. What's that? It's all right? Someone asked in the darkness. Yes, it is all right, said the Frenchman. It is Madame. She is now in her trance. Now gentlemen, if you will wait quietly, you will see something I think,

something which will interest you very much. Still the ticking in the hall, still the breathing, deeper and fuller now from the medium, still the occasional flash, more welcome than ever of the passing lights of the handsome cabs. What a gap we were bridging, the half-raised veil of the Eternal on the one side,

and the cabs of London on the other. The table was throbbing with a mighty pulse. It swayed steadily, rhythmically, with an easy swooping, scooping motion under our fingers. Sharp little wraps and cracks came from its substance, file firing, volley firing, the sounds of a fire burning briskly on a frosty night. Brilliant. Brilliant. Woo.

That's very, it's very good, isn't it? And then he balls it up. He balls it up by making the manifestation at the seance a unicorn. I think that laughter speaks for itself. And he gets so far and he does it so well. And you just think of all the things that could be manifested. Even if it was some great huge animal, because when you have the sounds of the animal next to the people at the seance, it is still terrifying.

The fact that it is based on a painting from earlier of a unicorn and this idea that if you imagine something, it can be manifested at a seance. It kind of weakens it. But there is a sense that, there's one thing I want to add. There is a sense that it comes from life. There is a sense that Doyle was at a seance or heard a story of a seance where a unicorn was made manifest. So it's this idea that he must be faithful to things that have happened in seances because of who he is. It's not just imagination. Because of that rationalist base.

But Laura, is the problem that something manifests in the physical realm and therefore ambiguity is stripped away, or is the problem that the thing that manifests is a unicorn? If say a different creature manifested or we didn't know what the creature was, would that spoil the story? I mean, I'm a medievalist. I'm totally here for the unicorn, right? I was like, you know, if not a unicorn, a dragon, come on. I think for me, I kind of haven't got a problem with the unicorn so much as the unicorn kind of crashes in and then the door and the chair

and things in the material world are kind of crushed and sort of destroyed by the unicorn kind of rushing through. And that's where I think, but maybe not though, someone who wasn't invested in these kinds of animals in the way that I am might think, yeah, come on, that's a bit daft. What were you on? You know, this long white spike gleaming in the lamplight that suddenly disappears and then everything is left broken. I think it became too material. If it had been the sound and the rushing through the room and

out again, that would have been great. And yet the passage that Andrew read is as good as anything that we've read on one of these Halloween backlisting. Absolutely brilliant. Brilliant piece of writing. And it continues like that. It's just fantastic. Well listen, we need to stop for a moment to hear a disembodied voice from the ether

and then after we've heard from our sponsors, we'll hear from Arthur Conan Doyle again. Welcome back, spirits. Would you care to share with us some more of your wisdom? I've always, of course, kept my mind open to new ideas. For the day a man's mind shuts is the day of his mental death. In 1887, some curious psychic experiences came my way. mind shuts as the day of his mental death. In 1887, some curious psychic experiences came my way.

And especially I was impressed by the fact of telepathy, which I proved for myself by experiments with a friend. The question then arose, if two incarnate minds could communicate, is it possible for a discarnate one to communicate with one that is still in the body? For more than 20 years I examined the evidence and came finally to the conclusion beyond all doubt that such communication was possible. Well that's that then. Case closed.

I think you get a real sense there of what we were talking about before the break. The need to explain everything. The need to explain everything away. And one of the themes of the stories I feel here is, as Andrew was referring to earlier, the stories often exist in relation to situations to do with murderers or the disappearance of trains or psychological impact or empire. Empire is a big theme. And every time you have this repeated trope where Conan Doyle's need to rationalize things that he senses are not fair or are cruel works against the grain of the story. So I'm thinking particularly of what's the story about one of the Empire stories? Fiend of the Cooparidge?

The Fiend of the Cooparidge. The one with the python. Again the Fiend of the Cooparidge is a story which contains elements of the dreadfully prosaic. And I don't want to give away what the fiend of the Coopbridge is, but when it manifests, it's horrifying. I think I gave it away. Apologies. No, but then when it's explained, you think, oh, you didn't have to do that. Yeah.

You didn't have to. You could let it live. But he's so resistant to that. That story is so good because the portrait of that small community with, they're working in a merchant warehouse on a river on the coast of West Africa. And the portrait, he'd been there as a doctor, Doyle at one point, and he paints the picture of them all absolutely coming down with malaria

and taking masses of quinine. Again he does that, he sets the scene up so well and everybody's always being, so many of these stories, people are visiting places where they get asked to sleep in rooms that are clearly, there's something not good in the room. Clearly haunted. And they're always intrepidly saying, I'd love to, I'd be absolutely delighted to. A marvelous opportunity.

Yes, but it's that thing in the spirit of investigation. But that feeds very nicely into your story, Laura. I know the story you want to talk about. Could you just tell people what your story is about? Can I just throw in one other quotation first to slightly speak in Doyle's defense? Because one of the things that I think's interesting in his interest in the supernatural is that he partly believes that eventually our knowledge will catch up and the supernatural is knowledge we don't yet have.

And he has this wonderful little thing in the leather funnel story where a character says, the charlatan is always the pioneer. From the astrologer came the astronomer, from the alchemist, the chemist, from the mesmerist, the experimental psychologist. The quack of yesterday is the professor of tomorrow. And I think there's this sense in which he has a kind of optimism about the possibility for a kind of synergy between science and the supernatural. Yeah, he thought at the end of the First World War there was going to be a massive change,

a new sort of religious order would happen, and that would be spiritualism. But also do you not feel his development is down to, to put it prosaically, believing his own press? believing his own press. You know, he's hailed as a genius for creating homes and a man whose social work in society and politics is important to the point where after the war, he feels because he is turning his attention to the paranormal, the world will follow him. But in fact, that's not what happens.

The world doesn't follow him. And that's the point at which he's increasingly perceived as a crank. Yeah. Sorry, Laura, we must talk about your story. Which story from around the fire stories did you choose? So I chose the Brazilian cat, which rather gives away its spoilers in the title, people. The kind of one sentence summary is sort of, penniless man undergoes trial by Tomcat in order to win inheritance.

The reason I chose this one, a couple of reasons. It's Halloween. It's about a cat. It's actually about a jaguar. I think it's really clever for the way it plays with genre. Conan Doyle is an expert across so many different genres. And this story has got the colonial adventure in it. It's a kind of inheritance story. It flirts with the gothic

and the supernatural in all kinds of ways. It's got a sealed cage, so it's back to the sealed room idea. And it's really interested in, I think Conan Doyle is interested in animals. Animals as a kind of site of sort of mystery, of danger and that colonial impulse to to categorize animals. Animals as a kind of site of sort of mystery of danger and that colonial impulse to to categorize animals. That's why there's so many beetle hunters. Such as the speckled band or the Hound of the Bascals indeed, right? Absolutely. And he's fascinated by cats, particularly tigers. When you read these stories you'll find all these moments where people behave. The woman at the end of the leather funnel is described as a cruel tigress. Men who were losing their minds and being violent suddenly spring like a tiger. And Conan Doyle's first story that he wrote when he was six years old

was about a man and a tiger and the tiger eats the man. And Conan Doyle sort of said, and when I got to that point, I wasn't really sure what to do because he'd eaten the tiger. And then one gets one's characters into these scrapes and then one can't get them out again. And something about cats as a kind of symbol of something around the kind of rightily process. But I wanted to read this one. So Pennyless Trap is hoping that maybe he'll get some inheritance. He's gone to this country house. His cousin has been on a big adventure in Brazil, brought a bunch of exotic animals back with him in the way that you did in those days. And then he ends up in the

cage with the black jaguar. And I want to read this partly because it looks forward to Hound of the Baskervilles, partly because it shifts between the narrator's perspective and the animal's perspective at the beginning, which I think is so fascinating. And it also reminds me of Grendel in Beowulf. So here we go. So he's in the cage with the creature. The cousin has named the creature Tommy, but he's not called Tommy in this moment. So the creature had never moved during this time. He lay still in the corner and his tail had ceased switching. This apparition of a man adhering to his bars and dragged screaming across him had apparently filled him with amazement.

And of course, that's the narrator himself. I saw his great eyes staring steadily at me. I had dropped the lantern when I seized the bars but it still burned upon the floor and I made a movement to grasp it with some idea that its light might protect me but the instant I moved the beast gave a deep and menacing growl. I stopped and stood still quivering with fear in every limb. The cat, if one may call so fearful a creature by so homely a name, was not more than 10 feet from me. The eyes glimmered like two disks of phosphorus

in the darkness. They appalled and yet fascinated me. I could not take my own eyes from them. Nature plays strange tricks with us at moments of intensity. And those glimmering lights waxed and waned with a steady rise and fall. Sometimes they seemed to be tiny points of extreme brilliancy, little electric sparks in the black obscurity. Then they would widen and widen until all the corner of the room was filled with their shifting and sinister light. And suddenly

they went out altogether. The beast had closed its eyes. And then it's revealed to be a cat. But the other monster in the story is the uncle, Everard King. And that's another theme that runs through Doyle's stories, these unpredictable men who will turn on you. Yes, and not the wife, not the woman, who the narrator is kind of, oh, he's got this exotic Brazilian wife who seems to hate me. Dude, she's trying to warn you to leave. She wants him to get the hell out because she knows that a plan is afoot. With our knowledge that Holmes exists, do we miss Holmes from these stories? I miss him from some of the stories.

I think the story that you've chosen, Andy, feels like a Holmes story without Holmes, although he might make an appearance in it. Yes, there are a couple of stories in Round the Fire stories. One is the, is the man with the watches, which is the story I might talk about in a bit. And the other one is the Lost Special, which is about the disappearing of a locomotive. There's lots of trains in the stories as well. Yeah.

Lots of train travel. But what is the narrative? I feel like that because we know Holmes exists and we are happy to let Holmes explain things to us, we are perhaps less happy when Conan Doyle himself explains things to us. Would you agree, John? Yeah. I mean, I think he just can't help. He just can't help himself kind of resolving the stories in a way that solves the mystery. It's going back to your point.

He just won't let the mystery be. So some of them work better than others. Some of them are a couple that are real duds. And you think that's just poor. You just obviously were on a deadline and you slung that one in at the last minute. But there's always interesting energy in there which comes from his life. The story that I chose, which is not a great story, but it ticks a lot of boxes. It's called the Japan box. The house in the country with a mysterious room where this man spends most of his time

They loves these mysterious rooms where people go in and nobody knows nobody can get in and out of this room But they hear a voice in the room a woman's voice and it turns out this man has been He doesn't appear to be seems like a very very quiet Studious slightly kind of melancholy man, but he was the biggest rake in London in his day. So that's another thing he likes to do, the transformation, the character that appears to be one thing and is in fact another. And there is a mysterious object within the room that

is in itself kind of inviolate. There is an object, a Japan box. And by accident, the guy, the narrator, who is again, another thing he loves is a completely pointless subplot, which is the narrator falling in love with the woman who's teaching governess in the house. Anyway, the Japan box is obviously throbbing with sort of strange energy. And at one point, a housekeeper kind of opens it and he turns back to his former rakish self,

Sir John Bollemore, and shouts at her and she leaves. I can't stay in this house another day. You know, Mrs. Hudson type, kind of, you know, flurry. And then you're thinking, what's going on? Is it seance? Is there a kind of, at one point he says, is there a, it's a medieval house, a pre-Norman house, which is almost impossible, but there you go.

He loved architecture. Doyle gets every, it's what I love about him. He's an enthusiast. He's always enthusiastic. Right, but what is the fear, what is the fear that is pushing Conan Doyle through this story? This is why, this is a great, this is why, what redeems the story is that it turns out that he was a rake and he was an alcoholic and he married a woman who saved him from his alcoholism. And what the voice is, again, mad, she's discovered an invention called the phonograph.

And she has recorded on her deathbed little, this is exactly, so you get little kind of reassurances. I'm not really gone, John, said the thin, gasping voice. I'm here at your elbow and shall be until we meet once more. I die happy to think that morning and night you will hear my voice. Oh, John, be strong, be strong until we meet again. And it's actually kind of... I will never drink again. It's kind of quite touching.

He's sitting there every evening listening to his voice, to his wife's voice, and not going back to drinking and carousing. The point being that his father was a terrible alcoholic. Conan Dawes' father was a terrible alcoholic. And he knows about addiction. And the book that actually you begin, when you reread the story once you know the ending, you realize that it is actually, it's written by somebody who has lived with somebody. But when you read a number of the story, once you know the ending, you realize that it is actually, it's written by somebody who has lived with somebody. But when you read a number of the stories, and a number of the stories are about men with terrible mood swings,

and you realize that these are about his father, the violent man. And he was institutionalized. And they are, I would posit that they are, Conan Doyle's repeated attempts to apply a rational way of thinking about a potentially chaotic and scary situation. But also do you think maybe the need to rationalize is also about, because as you say, his father was institutionalized, there is that fear of madness.

So the opposite thing to the fear of madness is the need to rationalize, the need to make sense of things, to remove them from the man. We haven't got time to, I haven't got time to read from it, but anybody listening to this, there's a story in Round the Fire Tales that I would love to talk about at some length called The Man with the Watches. Now if we're talking about things that men are frightened of, this is a story about a respectable gentleman of the community whose younger brother is a thief who has fallen in with a very evil man who gets the younger brother to dress as a woman and go on sprees together. And there is a climactic scene that if Dr. Freud

has ever read this story, he would find terrible amounts to extract from it. I won't read it now if you have a chance to read it, The Man with the Watches. It's that thing. But again, it's the repeated thing of Conan Doyle's either knowledge that something is terrifying or suspicion that something is terrifying. He sensed that, for instance, John was talking about the alcoholism in the Japan box. His views there are very progressive for their time about alcoholism. His views about race in terms of how in some of these stories we should give you due warning are very of their time and not progressive at all. And yet, Andrew, there is an underpinning that his sense he wants to believe in the empire, but he cannot

ignore the- There's the fear of empire as well, the dread of empire. The big cats, the big cats is the dread of empire and colonialism. And in his life, he got knighted for writing kind of propaganda in favor of the Boer War. That's where he gets the serve from. But then he became obsessed with the Belgian Congo from another perspective, saying, you know, what was done here is indefensible. Because of a friendship with Sir Roger Casement.

Casement, yeah. Which is why he kind of also came out for Home Rule in Ireland as well. He's a fascinating bunch of contradictions. I kind of like him, I have to say. He's a joiner in. He played in golf. He played in golf for Portsmouth. He played a lot of cricket with J.M. Barry's cricket team as well. He more or less single-handedly introduced skiing to Switzerland. He learned how to ski in Norway and when he got to Switzerland, where he lived for a while, nobody skied before. So he's the sort of person who you get everybody organized and out there playing sports and doing things. Well, when we get to the look

listed part of the show, there'll be a discussion of the Hound of the Baskervilles. We felt it would be incorrect to have a Halloween show about Conan and Doyle and not spend some time on the Hound of the Baskervilles. We felt it would be incorrect to have a Halloween show about Conan and Doyle and not spend some time on the Hound of the Baskervilles, but we're saving that for the subscribers only podcast, Locklisted. You'll also be able to hear contributions from this lovely audience here at Foils. But I wanted to bring it round to a quiz because I enjoy a quiz. Now, Arthur Conan Doyle and his invention, Sherlock Holmes, captivated the world. People wanted to know what the next adventure was going to be of their hero. They were totally invested in it. Much in the same way that here in 2024, Taylor Swift has

captivated the world with her tales of suspicious characters and the evil that men do. So we are going to play a round of a quiz called Doyle or Swift. I will give each of you the title of either a story by Arthur Conan Doyle or a song by Taylor Swift. And you have to tell me which is which. And judging from the conversations backstage before we started, this should be carnage. I've never been more afraid. Go on. Is it Swift or is it Doyle? Out of the Woods. Swift. Correct.

That is Swift from her album 1989. Andrew. Out of the Running. Swift. I'm afraid not. It's Arthur Conan Doyle. Will you keep score on it? Okay.

Laura. Doyle or Swift? The tortured poet's department. Oh, Swift. Swift is the right answer. Her most recent album Fearless. Andrew. The Great War. These are tough, Andy Miller. Doyle. It's Swift.

Taylor Swift, everybody, has a song called The Great War. From Midnight's 3AM edition. Laura, the smallest man who ever lived. Doyle, surely. Swift! From her recent album The Tortured Poets Departments. John, a duet with an occasional chorus. Arthur Conan Doyle. Yes, that is Conan Doyle. Well done. Andrew, the tragedians. Ooh, Swift. Arthur Conan Doyle.

Oh. Laura, my friend, the murderer. Ooh. Doyle. It is Doyle. And just one more, one more for John. Go on. We are never getting back together. Is Doyle, and just one more, one more for John. God. We are never getting back together.

Taylor Swift. Oh, John. You're thinking of we are never ever getting back together. We are never getting back together was Arthur Conan Doyle's working title for The Final Problem, the last appearance of Holmes and Moriarty. Well, there you go. Brilliant. Two to John, two to Laura.

And zero. Zero to Andrew. Congratulations, Andrew. Music critic Andrew Mayles. I'm not sorry. I would like to ask each of you separately, what is the unique element of Conan Doyle's writing that means we can sit here talking about him almost 150 years after he was writing. That keeps people coming back because I don't think it's just Holmes. We will talk about Holmes in Locklisted when we get

to it but what are the qualities within Conan Doyle's writing? We've had some fun at his expense. So I feel it's right to give him the credit where it's due. Why do we keep coming back to Conan Doyle? John, do you want to start? I would say that there are two things that he does. He is genius at setting a scene. He catches a, you know, some of them may be, you know, crumbling piles in the country or

desolate moorland or a railway carriage, but he is brilliant at setting a scene without getting down the master storyteller. He tells a story. He might lose it a little bit towards the end, but three quarters of the way into these stories, you are hooked. It's a massively enjoyable collection, I think, for that reason. He is absolutely in control. And for his own peculiarities, somehow lets that go at the end. I mean, I think that's maybe an Edwardian positivist problem. Yeah. Andrew, why do you, what is it about Conan? I think I would agree his ability to establish a sense of place, but also I think that he's a populist.

He is someone who felt that he was particularly good at writing, you know, historical novels. But I think there's always a sense that he is at his best writing for the popular audience. And so there's a lack of... He's like Dickens in that way. Yeah, but unlike Dickens though, he has a kind of self-loathing, at least for some of his life, doesn't he? That Holmes is this cheap trick that he pulls off. A cheap trick that he can do brilliantly. I think that's the thing.

It's like with so many artists, the thing that they find easiest to do is the thing that they grow to hate. Yeah, yeah. We talked about, didn't we, Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, who doesn't want to commit any more murders, but it's the thing he's really good at. It's the thing he's best at, yeah.

And to some extent Conan Doyle is a very good example of that with Holmes. And there's a tragedy to that, you know, and there's that sense that he wants to be known for something else. He wants to be known for historical fiction set in the 14th century. That's what he thinks is going to be, that thinks is going to be remembered for after he's dead. And yet, like Steve Coogan with Alan Partridge, he comes back round to liking homes, doesn't he? Towards the end of his... Not that it's near the end of Steve Coogan's life, God willing. But you know what I mean, he wants to be seen as being serious, but he comes to an accommodation with his creation.

Like Steve Coogan and Alan Partridge, the fascination is the tension between the creator and the character. And, Laurie, you came to these relatively fresh. What struck you about Conan Doyle's prose or his storytelling abilities? Just reminding me of De Mauret so much. It just reminded me of De Morier so much. There's a kind of proficiency of play with genre that you think you're in one genre

and then suddenly you're in another and that's sentence by sentence. So it makes you such a, you've really got to be on your toes reading these stories because you suddenly think, well, which kind of story am I in? And when he lets himself go, there's an imagination that I think is as kind of broad and powerful as Demorié. There's a story in the Oxford World's classics that I'd really recommend that's not in the Round the Fire collection,

but that's called The Horror of the Heights. And I'll say nothing about it, but it's absolutely wild. It's really stayed with me since I read it. He also wrote this little essay called Stranger Than Fiction and he has this sentence at the end where he says, the unknown and the marvelous press upon us from all sides. They loom above us and around us in undefined and fluctuating shapes, some dark, some shimmering, but all warning us of the limitations of what we call matter and of the need for spirituality if we are to keep in touch with the true inner facts of life. This is a man who is constantly trying to, it is what John said, is kind of join in, go get them,

can do attitude of that is a very kind of Victorian thing, but with the kind of fear of new technology, of trains, of how do I unpack how do I unpack what's going on around me when I'm being pressed from all sides? I would also like to draw listeners' attention to another story in the Oxford classic Gothic Tales. There's a story called Dei Profundis that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote where the depths referred to are the depths of the ocean, which is absolutely superb. I think what an editor should have done with Conan Doyle is make a different selection of titles. So those Gothic tales published by World Classics,

if you are looking for something for Halloween and you want to step outside the usual circuit, I recommend those wholeheartedly. They are really wonderful. So we are going to continue this discussion in next week's episode of Lock Listed, available to Patreon subscribers. And there's going to be some discussion of how to the Bask of Bills, and there's going to be some questions from our audience here at Foils. But John, let's take it out. Let's take it out.

Yes, I'm afraid that's where we must end it. Is it really the end? Just a passage into a parallel realm, a ghostly astral plane full of disembodied voices and restless spirits. I think we now call that podcasting. Thank you to Andrew and Laura for once again offering to play the happy mediums. To the Foils team and in particular, Harry McNamara, and to tonight's Ouija board operators and producers of Paranormal Patients,

Nikki Burch and her daughter, Mystic Meg. already recorded, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop. If you want to hear Backlisted early and ad-free, subscribe to our Patreon, www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits if you subscribe. You get to sit in foils and ask us questions. You'll also get not just one but two extra exclusive podcasts every month called Lock Listed, features the three of us talking and recommending books, films and music we've enjoyed during the previous fortnight. And for those of you who are still in the room, not once for yes, twice for no, hang around and join us for an even deeper dive into Doiliana.

But first, thank you to Andrew and Laura. To the disembodied spirit of Arthur Conan Doyle. Join hands for Arthur Conan Doyle. There we go. Yes, very good. In the traditional manner, before we go, Laura, is there anything else you would like to say about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or these stories before we go? Yes, one thing. I'd like to recommend a story called The Parasite, which is available in the

British Library Playing with Fire compilation of Doyle short stories. Written in 1894, published the same year as George de Moriarty's Trilby and is also interested in mesmerism and but the hypnotist is a woman so I would highly recommend that story there was clearly something in the air in 1893 to 4. Very good thank you. Andrew Mayall as is almost become the kind of folk cults now. If the stories from Round the Fire Tales were a Gene Kelly film, which Gene Kelly film would they be? This Gene Kelly film is a model tale of spiritualism and the astral plane,

in which an ancient Greek muse is materialized by an imaginative painter of heraldic beasts. She then drives him to insanity, encouraging him and his venerable American friend to convert a beautiful art deco auditorium into a roller skating rink. It is of course Xanadu. Yes, magnificent, magnificent. Xanadu from 1980. Happy Halloween everybody, thank you, goodbye. Bye.