In the years that followed the end of the Great War, which he was to describe in Memories and Adventures as ‘the physical climax of my life’ (M&A, 265), Arthur Conan Doyle felt that a national and personal crisis was over. There was time for reflection and retrospection. He probably sensed that his best literary work was behind him – he had not published a novel since The Valley of Fear in 1915 – though he continued to write and publish with a Victorian industriousness. His mother, to whom he was devoted, had died at the end of 1920, and the children of his second marriage were growing up and often accompanied their parents on their extensive travels. These indefatigable wanderings, in Europe, Australasia, North America, and South Africa, which occupied so much of the last decade of Conan Doyle's life, were lecture tours in which he sought to spread the revelations of Spiritualism, which, as he wrote in the last chapter of his autobiography, had come ‘to absorb the whole energy of [his] life’ (M&A, 337).

He was known around the world as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, though there were other literary achievements of which he was more proud. In 1923, after the publication of ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ and as he contemplated writing his life story, he seems to have made one of his periodic resolutions to write no more Sherlock Holmes tales.