Episode Details

Arthur Conan Doyle created the most rational fictional detective in literary history — and spent his later years championing spiritualism, defending fake fairy photographs, and insisting that the dead could communicate with the living. The gap between Holmes's cold logic and Doyle's credulous mysticism is one of the strangest contradictions in literary biography. He killed Holmes off because he hated him, brought him back because the public demanded it, and never resolved the war between his character's skepticism and his own belief.

This episode traces Doyle from his Edinburgh medical training through the creation of Holmes, the Reichenbach Falls murder, the reluctant resurrection, and the spiritualist crusade that consumed his final decades.

• The medical training that gave Holmes his deductive method and the writing career it subsidized
• The decision to kill Holmes at Reichenbach Falls and the public fury that forced his resurrection
• The Cottingley Fairies — Doyle's defense of obviously faked photographs of fairies
• The spiritualist crusade, the break with Houdini, and the paradox of a rationalist's creator who believed in ghosts