Scottish writer and physician (who wrote his medical thesis on syphillis), Doyle is of course best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, stories concerning whom are, by and large, outside the range of this website, although some, such as The Hound of the Baskervilles
[395K; UVa Etext Center] and "The Sussex Vampire," flirt with the supernatural. Plenty of Sherlockian info is to be found at the sites listed below. Doyle's well-known interest in spiritualism (which became rather pronounced in his later years, to put it delicately, to say nothing of his belief in fairies) led him to write some supernaturalist works as well; in this straddling of the gap between the ratiocinative and the supernatural, Doyle shares much with Edgar Allan Poe; although Doyle has his famous detective speak somewhat slightingly of Poe's famous detective (in the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet), the debt Doyle owes to Poe is considerable.
