St. Martin's Press

In June 1883, the prestigious Cornhill magazine paid Conan Doyle a handsome 29 guineas for his story “J. Habakuk Je- phson’s Statement,” a chiller inspired by the real-life case of the Mary Celeste, the American brig found floating unmanned off Gibraltar ten years earlier. “It is going to make a sensation,” Doyle predicted, though this was mitigated by the fact that the Cornhill published it without a by-line, leading many reviewers to speculate that it had been written by Robert Louis Stevenson.*

in the 1890 Holmes novel The Sign of Four

This was also the period in which the seemingly conventional provincial GP was attending