What you’re about to hear takes place in West Inch, a city on the English-Scottish border. The title is an unusual reference to a shadow forming over the city that’s said to be about the influence and reputation of the infamous Napoleon.
This is all a change of literary output by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, famed for his stories about Sherlock Holmes. He had gotten a little tired of that character and turned, at least for a while, to a man named Jock Calder, who was one of the soldiers at the scene of military activity, including the battle of Waterloo.
The Great Shadow tale here was first published in 1892. Listen to find out what happened.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a writer and physician most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, the first scientific detective, which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. Before becoming a writer, he attended the University of Edinburgh to train as a physician, and it was from his teacher, Joseph Bell, that he learned much of what would inspire Holmes’s skills of deduction. He also wrote science fiction stories, historical novels, plays, romances, poetry, and nonfiction. After his son Kingsley died in the first World War, he became a convert to spiritualism and a social reformer who used his investigative skills to prove the innocence of individuals.View all by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle