The Captain of the Polestar

by Arthur Conan Doyle

Overview

Although Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best known as the creator of the brilliant fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, the author tried his hand at a number of different genres before perfecting the detective story. "The Captain of the Polestar" showcases a different, but equally engrossing, side of the author's undeniable talent for fiction. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788827575512
Publisher:	Qasim Idrees
Publication date:	02/21/2018
Sold by:	StreetLib SRL
Format:	eBook
File size:	672 KB

About the Author

The life of Arthur Conan Doyle illustrates the excitement and diversity of the Victorian age unlike that of any other single figure of the period. At different points in his life he was a surgeon on a whaling ship; a GP; an apprentice eye-surgeon; an unsuccessful parliamentary candidate (twice); a multi-talented sportsman; one of the inventors of cross-country skiing in Switzerland; a formidable public speaker; a campaigner against miscarriages of justice; a military strategist; a writer in a range of forms; and the head of an extraordinary family. In his autobiography, he wrote: 'I have had a life which, for variety and romance, could, I think, hardly be exceeded.' He was not wrong. But Conan Doyle was also a Victorian with a twist, a man of tensions and contradictions. He was fascinated by travel, exploration, and invention, indeed all things modern and technological; yet at the same time he was also very traditional, voicing support for values such as chivalry, duty, constancy, and honour. By the time of his death in July 1930 he was a celebrity, achieving worldwide fame and notoriety for his creation of the rationalist, scientific super-detective Sherlock Holmes; yet at the same time his later decades were taken up with his advocacy of the new religion of Spiritualism, in which he was a devoted believer.

Date of Birth:

May 22, 1859

Date of Death:

July 7, 1930

Place of Birth:

Edinburgh, Scotland

Place of Death:

Crowborough, Sussex, England

Education:

Edinburgh University, B.M., 1881; M.D., 1885

Editorial Reviews

The Captain of the "Pole-Star": Weird and Imaginative Fiction, edited by Christopher and Barbara Roden, shows that, at least literarily speaking, the supernatural was not an entirely new phase in Conan Doyle's development. Here are ghost stories, science fiction and horror stories, including the title piece, about a voyage to the far north on a boat captained by a man with "a curious way of twitching his limbs." It doesn't take long for the narrator to note in his journal, "My deliberate opinion is that we are commanded by a madman."
— The Washington Post

Dennis Drabelle