Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters
Edited by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley
Harper Press £25, 710 pages
FT bookshop price: £20

In his autobiography, G.K. Chesterton imagined a newspaper that offered racing tips from psychics: The Sporting and Spiritualist Gazette. His friend Arthur Conan Doyle, in thrall to spiritualism, could hardly have struck such a happy medium. He called for a new science of the paranormal (to be called plasmology) and believed the deceased came to life through luminous voice trumpets.