This new Edinburgh University Press edition of The Stark Munro Letters by Arthur Conan Doyle is the first to be published in the UK since 1930. Apart from an American small press edition published in 1983, the novel is an almost forgotten footnote in the otherwise illustrious career of a still-celebrated author with an apparently permanent grip on the popular imagination, thanks to his enduring creation Sherlock Holmes. In 1893–94, when The Stark Munro Letters was written, Holmes and his creator were already household names, and Conan Doyle could be confident that his years as a struggling medical professional were far behind him. He spent much of that period in Davos in Switzerland where his wife, Louisa, was convalescing with tuberculosis (‘the great misfortune which darkened and deflected our lives’), providing geographical as well as temporal distance from his former life as a young doctor. Only a handful of years previously he had been struggling to establish himself as a general practitioner in Southsea, where he lived between 1882 and 1890, and where he embarked on his literary career, writing during the many quiet hours sitting at his desk with no patients crossing the threshold of his practice.

Despite his literary success, the years 1893 and 1894 were also marked by sadness: Conan Doyle was coming to terms with the likely terminal nature of his wife's illness and mourning the loss of his father, an alcoholic who had died at the age of 61 of an epileptic seizure.