The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859. He trained to be a doctor at Edinburgh University and eventually set up a medical practice in Southsea. During the quiet periods between patients, he turned his hand to writing, producing historical novels such as Micah Clarke and adventure yarns including The Lost World, as well as four novels and fifty-six stories involving his most celebrated creations, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Doyle was knighted in 1902. In later life he devoted much of his time to his belief in Spiritualism, using his writing and celebrity as a means of providing funds to support activities in this field. He died in 1930.

Peter Haining wrote and edited a number of acclaimed books on the supernatural, including Ghosts: The Illustrated History, and A Dictionary of Ghosts, as well as fiction anthologies The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories. He also collected and edited several books about Sherlock Holmes including The Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook and The Television Sherlock Holmes to tie in with the iconic Jeremy Brett series of the eighties and nineties. A former publisher and much admired figure, he died in 2007. He lived in a sixteenth-century house in Suffolk that is haunted by the ghost of a Napoleonic prisoner of war.