Worldwide Doyle 2024

We are pleased to announce this years Worldwide Doyle Lecture Series for 2024!

All talks were held via zoom and are avaliable to watch now from our partner the Doings of Doyle's youtube playlist.

Following on from 2021's Professor Neil McCaw Lecture Series and the 2022 and 2023 Arts Council funded The Detectives 'Worldwide Doyle' project, we are delighted to present the following talks from researchers who have visited the Richard Lancelyn Green Bequests' vast Conan Doyle Collection.

Neil McCaw, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at Winchester University, died in 2020. He became involved in the Conan Doyle Collection in 2005 and advised on the first initial cataloguing and identifying the Collection as a unique and diverse collection. Neil went on to give wider academic talks globally about the Collection, which broadened our audiences, produced texts for exhibitions that have toured around the world to diverse audiences, wrote and produced a facsimile for The Adventure of the Creeping Man and then later curated the You Don't Know Sherlock Holmes, Yet exhibition.

2^nd July 2024 - Professor Christine Ferguson - University of Stirling

Towards the Centenary of The Land of Mist:

Arthur Conan Doyle, Spiritualism, and Scandal in 1920s Britain

First serialized in the Strand between 1925-26, Arthur Conan Doyle described The Land of Mist as his “big psychic novel” which would, he hoped, prompt wide-spread conversion to the modern spiritualist cause he had been publicly championing since 1916. My talk examines how the novel developed from and responded to various controversies in the early nineteenth-twenties British occult scene, including the Cottingley Fairy fiasco, the tabloid crusade against Thelemic sex magician Aleister Crowley, and Harry Houdini’s public attack on the authenticity of Jean Doyle’s mediumship. We will see how Doyle enlisted the capable male adventurer characters from Doyle’s popular Professor Challenger series to promote a sane, seemingly scientific, and scandal-free brand of Christian spiritualism in line with his increasingly conservative and enduringly nationalistic outlook, one often at odds with the cosmopolitan modernity that The Land of Mist depicts.

8th July 2024 - Paul Chapman, Ross Davies and Mark Jones

The Adventure of the Imaginary Pedlar

Arthur Conan Doyle and the Army on Manoeuvres

Ross Davies is a law professor at George Mason University (law.gmu.edu/faculty) and founder of the ACD Society (acdsociety.com). He edits the Green Bag and the Baker Street Almanac (greenbag.org). His recent books include A Masterpiece of Villainy (about Sherlock Holmes) and The Black Book of Justice Holmes (about the American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, not the British detective). His next book, Casey at the Bat and the Supreme Court (in which both Holmeses appear), is about baseball.

Mark Jones, BSI (“Peter Jones”), MBt, ASH, is a Sherlockian and Doylean from York in the United Kingdom. Originally a history lecturer, he now works with universities across the world as a consultant. He has written for the many Sherlockian journals including the Baker Street Journal, The Sherlock Holmes Journal and The Magic Door and is a regular contributor to Canadian Holmes. His most recent book, Conan Doyle - Mystery and Adventure: Inside the Lost 1967 BBC TV Series, was released in 2023. He is the co-host of Doings of Doyle –The Arthur Conan Doyle podcast, with Paul M. Chapman.

Paul M. Chapman has written widely on Victorian and Edwardian genre literature, with a particular focus on the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, J.S. Le Fanu, and M.R.James. He was a staff writer on Sherlock magazine for ten years and edited The Ritual for the Northern Musgraves Sherlock Holmes Society, and is the co-host, with Mark Jones, of the Doings of Doyle podcast. He is also the author of Birth of a Legend: Count Dracula, Bram Stoker and Whitby and has contributed articles and reviews to ACD: The Journal of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society, The Musgrave Papers, All Hallows, Ghosts & Scholars and Wormwood, The New Sherlock Holmes Review, Steel True, Blade Straight, and Reading Holmes.

Following the conclusion of this talk we announced the release of our limited edition postcard based on the newly uncovered image of Conan Doyle and another man standing with a bike captioned with Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyles distinctive handwriting. What was that meant to signify? Find out more including how to order your postcard from our blog post.

9th July 2024 - Mattias Bostrom

"Was Killing Sherlock Holmes a Stroke of Genius?"

 A Contemporary Perspective on Conan Doyle and His Creation in the Mid 1890s

Mattias Boström is the author of Agatha Award winning From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men and Women Who Created an Icon (Mysterious Press, 2017), which won several other prizes and was nominated for Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity awards. He has made occasional contributions to the Baker Street Journal and serves as one of the editors for the Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle in the Newspapers series (Gasogene Books). He resides with his wife and two daughters outside of Stockholm, Sweden, and is a member of various Sherlockian societies around the world, including the Baker Street Irregulars, the Baskerville Hall Club of Sweden (as an honorary member), and others.

15th July 2024 - Douglas Kerr

1909: Arthur Conan Doyle goes to the theatre

Was Conan Doyle a good dramatist? What happened when he decided to adapt The Tragedy of the Korosko, his adventure tale set on the Nile, into dramatic form? This talk sets out to tell the story of his dealings with actors, producers, audiences, and critics, and to show how and why the original tale evolved into something very different as it became the play The Fires of Fate, first staged in London’s West End in 1909.

Douglas Kerr is Honorary Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong and Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, London University. He is the author of Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession and Practice (Oxford University Press), and General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle.