The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" is a series of 5 novels written by Vaughn Entwistle published by Minotaur Books and Masque Publishing between 2014 and 2022.
In these novels, the main characters Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde are investigating paranormal cases.
Novels
-
The Revenant of Thraxton Hall (2014) -
The Dead Assassin (2015) -
The Teleporting Tomb and Other Tales (2020) -
Magnetic Sleep (2021) -
The Faerie Vortex (2022)
Plot summaries
The Revenant of Thraxton Hall (2014)
Suspicious of being drawn into a web of charlatanism, the author is initially reluctant, but the lure of an intrigue proves irresistible. Arthur Conan Doyle assumes the mantle of his fictional consulting detective and recruits a redoubtable Watson in the Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, who brings to the sleuthing duo a razor-keen mind, an effervescent wit, and an outrageous sense of fashion.
The game is a afoot as the two friends board a steam train for Northern England to visit the Medium's stately home — a brooding Gothic pile swarmed by ghosts. Here, they encounter an eccentric mélange of seers, scientists, psychics and skeptics — each with an inflated ego and a motive for murder. As the night of the fateful séance draws near, the two writers find themselves entangled in a Gordian Knot that would confound even the powers of a Sherlock Holmes to unravel — how to solve a murder before it is committed.
The Dead Assassin (2015)
1895. Victorian England trembles on the verge of anarchy. Handbills plastered across London scream of revolution and insurrection. Terrorist bombs are detonating around the Capitol and every foreigner is suspected of being a bomb-throwing Anarchist lurking beneath a cape. Even Palace officials whisper warnings of a coup-de-tat.
Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle is summoned from a peaceful dinner in the palm-room of the Tivoli restaurant to the scene of a gruesome crime that has baffled and outraged Scotland Yard's best. A senior member of Her Majesty's government has been murdered — assassinated—in the most brutal and savage fashion. The body of his attacker lies several streets away — riddled with pistol bullets that inexplicably failed to stop him from carrying out his lethal mission. More perplexing, one of the attending detectives recognises the dead assassin as Charlie Higginbotham, a local Cockney pickpocket and petty thief. Higginbotham is not just an improbable suspect, but an impossible suspect, for the young detective collared Charlie for the murder of his wife and watched him take the drop two weeks previously, hanged at Newgate Prison.
Conan Doyle calls in his friend Oscar Wilde for assistance and soon the two authors find themselves swept up in an investigation so bizarre it defies conventional wisdom and puts the lives of their loved ones, the Nation, and even the Monarch herself in dire peril.
The murders continue, committed by a shadowy cadre of seemingly unstoppable assassins. As the sinister plot unravels, an implausible theory becomes the only possible solution: someone is reanimating the corpses of executed criminals and sending them shambling through the London fog... programmed for murder.
The Teleporting Tomb and Other Tales (2020)
- The Teleporting Tomb : Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde meet the bizarre Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi in the pre-dawn darkness of London’s Brompton Cemetery. They rendesvous at the at the Courtoy mausoleum, an Egyptian-themed tomb thot Bonomi claims is, in reality, a Victorian time machine or teleportation device. Although Oscar Wilde is highly skeptical and even Conan Doyle has his doubts, when the tomb door is finally opened, the incredible truth is revealed.
- The Cabaret of the Void : When Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle visit the City of Lights, the lure of Parisian flesh pots such as the Folies Bergere and the Moulin Rouge seems irresistible. But instead, Oscar Wilde takes Conan Doyle to an alternative venue, "The Cabaret of the Void", a nihilistic-themed night club that makes light of death with its morbid and ghoulish decor. Here they encounter two young lovers having a spat. But when the lover’s tiff turns violent, Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde are swept up in a murky melodrama of love, murder, death... and the here-after.
- The After-Life Telephone : The genius scientist, Sir William Crookes summons our friends to a meeting at a derelict graveyard. However, the reason is not spiritual but purely monetary—the chance to invest in a new technology that promises to yield a fortune—the wireless telephone. However, the choice of the old cemetery takes an unexpected turn when the phone rings as the dead start calling.
- Death Mask : Augustine Schneider, the world-famous phrenologist, invites Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde to see his huge collection of death masks, the largest in the world. But when an errant champagne cork accidentally shatters a glass flask containing the final breath of an infamous serial killer, the evening turns into a struggle for survival.
- Night Walking : Conan Doyle is staying at his club in the city of London when he suffers with a bout of insomnia. In hopes of tiring himself out, he decides upon a walk about the night time city. However, his evening stroll soon turns into an odyssey around a London that the night time has rendered strange, alien and filled with uncanny presences.
- The Necropolis Railway : After attending a literary soiree, Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde find themselves tramping the fog-bound streets of London in search of a ride home. However, the fog has bullied all the cab-drivers from the streets. The two friends think themselves lucky when they find a darkened railway station. Although the trains still run, they have mistakenly bought tickets for the Necropolis Railway, a service intended to carry the coffins of the recently deceased and their mourners. Both men fall asleep on the train ride only to awaken at a final destination neither wanted to visit.
Magnetic Sleep (2021)
During a sultry London summer, the capitol is stricken by an outbreak of what newspapers soon dub "Sleepwalking Hysteria." Strangely, nearly all the somnambulists are lissome young ladies from good homes. Stranger still, many of the sleepwalkers are committing crimes including burglary and arson, while others simply vanish into the night, never to be seen again.
Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde are swept up in the case when they try to rescue one such somnambulist only to watch her plummet to her death. As eye witnesses they become embroiled in an investigation that involves white slavers, a music hall hypnotist with a magnetic attraction to the ladies, a bumbling Police Inspector named Crumpet, a muck-racking young reporter from the Illustrated Police News, and a suspicious foreigner — a psychiatrist who claims he can decipher the mysteries of the mind and knows the secrets of hypnosis.
His name — Sigmund Freud.
The stakes are raised when the wives of both authors succumb to the sleepwalking hysteria and vanish on the same night. With the fate of both women in jeopardy, our Victorian super-sleuths race to solve the mystery before their loved ones become the next victims of "Sleepwalking Hysteria."
The Faerie Vortex (2022)
When Oscar Wilde answers an urgent summons to the British Museum Reading Room, he finds his friend, Arthur Conan Doyle, in a state of profound agitation.
The Scots author has discovered a mysterious casebook entitled: "The Faerie Vortex". The casebook contains a highly fantastical story about a trip the two authors made to the seaside town of Darvington in response to a letter from a woman who claims her daughters had been abducted by faeries. Although the trip took place a year ago, neither man has any memory of the journey, although proof has been pasted into the Casebook in the form of cancelled train tickets, a photograph of a little girls' picnic (complete with faery visitors), and even a time-yellowed map of the lost village of Wyrme-Hallow.
But most worrying of all is the front page clipping of the Darvington newspaper describing Wilde's arrest for the suspected abduction and murder of the two young girls. As the horrified authors debate the need to revisit Darvington to unravel the mystery, the two are torn between the need to find out the truth but terrified that Oscar Wilde risks facing murder charges if they return. Plus, as Oscar Wilde himself vexingly points out, "How can we return to a place we've never been to?"
