It was well after I had finished this series of twentieth century English writers that I was reminded that I had left out one of the most influential. This was Arthur Conan Doyle, and I suppose the reason was that he seemed to me very much a Victorian writer. But though his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, seems every inch a Victorian, ensconced in his bachelor pad in Baker Street, his most memorable adventure as I see it, The Hound of the Baskervilles, was published in 1901. Conan Doyle went on to write many more stories about Sherlock Holmes, before his death in 1930, and also created in the second decade of the new century another character, whom I find as fascinating as Holmes. It makes sense, then, to include him here, as in effect the father of the popular detective novel, with a hero who is certainly much more iconic than his closest challenger, the Belgian Hercule Poirot.

But before I concentrate on the Sherlock Holmes books, I will glance at Professor Challenger, who first saw life in 1912 in The Lost World, a splendid science fiction yarn set in South America, with dinosaurs and pterodactyls and dangerous apes. These are all dealt with firmly by a cast of intrepid adventurers that seemed to epitomize British pluck. Oddly enough, however, one of them was supposed to have been based on Roger Casement, the Irish diplomat and explorer who was later executed for treason during the Irish uprising against the British. Though Conan Doyle broke up his friendship with Casement, he did argue against his execution, on the grounds that he must have been mad.