Playing with Fire: The Weird Tales of Arthur Conan Doyle

A thrilling new collection of stories pairing strange creatures with frightening encounters to revive the fearsome past of the fairy folk.

There was an enormous fascination with fairies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which popularised depictions of benevolent winged friends and things of fragile beauty. But in wider folklore, the creatures of the fey are of a much more unsettling and otherworldly stock. Taking inspiration from folk tales and medieval legends, writers of weird tales and ghost stories such as Arthur Machen, M. R. James and Charlotte Riddell proved that fairies, elves, goblins and their ilk were something to be feared and respected as our ancestors did.


Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a British writer, physician and spiritualist, world famous today as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Along with detective stories, he wrote numerous tales of historical events and fictional expeditions such as the influential novel of prehistoric discovery The Lost World.