This month, we join a young doctor struggling to recruit patients for his medical practice in ‘Crabbe’s Practice’ from 1884, a story that Conan Doyle rewrote in its entirety in 1922.

You can read the two versions of the story here.

Or listen to an audiobook version of the 1922 version here.

The episode will appear on our YouTube page. Please like and subscribe.

You can follow us @doingsofdoyle on BlueSky.

Synopsis

When they were fellow medical students at Edinburgh University, Robert Hudson had foreseen a successful and rewarding career for the eccentric but brilliant John Waterhouse Crabbe. His prophecy appears to have been fulfilled when Crabbe invites Hudson to stay at his impressive and well-appointed residence-cum-practice at Bridport. All, however, is not as it seems: Crabbe is the area’s least regarded doctor, despite his local family connections, and he is desperate need of a plan to attract patients and stave off bankruptcy. Hudson provides an answer: he will play the role of a well-heeled gentleman who is suddenly taken ill on Crabbe’s doorstep and then cured within. Crabbe then further dramatises the plot to involve Hudson’s miraculous recovery from a staged drowning. What could possibly go wrong?

Next time on Doings of Doyle

We look at one of the last stories penned by Conan Doyle, his Regency short story ‘The End of Devil Hawker' (1930). You can read the story here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our supporters on Patreon and Paypal.

Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.

Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

YouTube video created by @headlinerapp.

This episode, we welcome to the podcast, James Machin, to talk about the new edition of The Stark Munro Letters (1895) he has edited for Edinburgh University Press.

About James Machin

James is a writer, researcher, and editor, whose recent books include the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle's version of The Stark Munro Letters (2024) and The Strange Stories of John Buchan for British Library Publishing (2025). He edited Faunus, the journal of The Friends of Arthur Machen, for over ten years, and has taught at Birkbeck (University of London), the Royal College of Art, and the University of Bedfordshire. He has recently commenced work on the Edinburgh Edition of Round the Fire Stories.

The Stark Munro Letters (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)

The first new edition of The Stark Munro Letters since the early 1980s

• Contains detailed introduction and scholarly apparatus
• Extensive notes explore the historical and biographical references
• Appendixes that collect original transcriptions of previously inaccessible archival material
• Ideal for students and scholars interested in Arthur Conan Doyle, medical fiction, popular fiction, autobiographical fiction, and epistolary fiction

This is the first scholarly edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s epistolary novel, originally serialised in the Idler, 1894–95, and long out of print. With its first-hand testimony of the life of a doctor at the outset of his career in the late nineteenth century, The Stark Munro Letters will appeal to anyone with an interest in medical history. It is based on his experiences during the eight years he spent as a General Practitioner, before becoming a professional author in 1890. By some way the most autobiographical of Conan Doyle’s novels—written at the height of Holmes’s popularity—it is also the most personal in terms of presenting his worldview during his formative years, including ruminations on moral philosophy, religion, science, and evolutionary theory. Moreover, it is entertaining and incredibly vivid—a contemporary critic described the mercurial Cullingworth as ‘one of the finest characters Dr. Doyle has yet drawn’.

Source: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-stark-munro-letters.html

Bibliography

The Strange Stories of John Buchan (British Library, 2025)

British Weird: Selected Short Fiction 1893 – 1937 (Handheld Classics, 2020)

Faunus: The Decorative Imagination of Arthur Machen (Strange Attractor Press, 2019)

Of Mud and Flame: A Penda's Fen Sourcebook (MIT Press, 2019)

Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

The Cosy Room and Other Stories (Tartarus Press, 2017)

Also mentioned

Margie Deck (ed), Sherlock Holmes Into The Fire (Belanger Books, 2025) https://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Into-Fire-Margie-ebook/dp/B0FJK3H29X

Next time on Doings of Doyle

We continue with Conan Doyle’s medical fiction with a related comic tale, ‘Crabbe’s Practice’ (1884). You can read the story here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our supporters on Patreon and Paypal.

Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.

Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

YouTube video created by @headlinerapp.

This episode, we travel to Wiltshire where an Indian army surgeon is being hounded by a very unwelcome visitor, in ‘The Story of the Brown Hand’ from 1898.

Read the show notes at https://www.doingsofdoyle.com/2025/06/64-story-of-brown-hand-1898.html

You can read the story here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Story_of_the_Brown_Hand

Or listen to an audiobook version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-tK9m42tKY

The episode will be uploaded to our YouTube channel soon, where you can listen with closed captions. In the meantime, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@doingsofdoyle

And follow us on BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/doingsofdoyle.com). We don’t do Twitter no more.

Synopsis

Following his retirement to an estate on the edge of Salisbury Plain after 40 years’ service in India, Sir Dominic Holden has invited his nephew Dr Hardacre to stay for a weekend. Hardacre assumes that this is simply a family courtesy, as he is only sixth in line of inheritance to his uncle’s fortune. He finds an hospitable enough household but one wrapped in an intense gloom, whose source he cannot fathom. Until, that is, Sir Dominic shows great interest in Hardacre’s ghost-hunting exploits with the Psychical Research Society…

Next time on Doings of Doyle…

We will be joined by a mystery interview guest…

Acknowledgements

Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our supporters on Patreon and Paypal.

Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.

Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

YouTube video created by @headlinerapp.