New on Librivox, Conan Doyle’s book The Last Galley, Impressions and Tales (1911). This is from before Doyle’s marked turn to spiritualism.

Doyle writes in his introduction…

The first half is made up of a series of pictures of the past … there is a region between actual story and actual history which has never been adequately exploited. I could imagine, for example, a work dealing with some great historical epoch, and finding its interest not in the happenings to particular individuals, their adventures and their loves, but in the fascination of the actual facts of history themselves. These facts might be coloured with the glamour which the writer of fiction can give…

The Academy remarked, in a review of the book on publication in 1911, that the evocations of the first section would make an excellent accompaniment to a tiresome journey…

The classical section, consisting of some 124 pages, is extremely well done and transports us into the atmosphere of the period in which the tales are told.

In the Librivox reading this historical section runs for three and a half hours.

In the eight stories that then make up the second half of the book, we end with “The Terror of Blue John Gap”. This is a upland monster-horror set in and beneath the Peak District of England, where the Midlands rises to meet the rocky North. The specific location it was based on would likely be Treak Cliff Cavern near Castleton, a Peak mine since Ancient Roman times and a source for ‘Blue John’ rock which the story title alludes to. The cave played a key role in the discovery of the principle of evolution by Erasmus Darwin.