Arthur Conan Doyle's writing has always been popular, but until recent years it has received scant attention from scholars. Now that he is beginning to be recognised as one of the most important writers of his generation, and his books are not just widely read but studied by students and critics all over the world, the time is ripe for the first scholarly critical edition of Conan Doyle's works. Appropriately this is being undertaken by the Press of Edinburgh University, for he was a native of the city, and a student of its university from 1876 to 1881.

While Conan Doyle is remembered primarily for the Sherlock Holmes stories, which defined the genre of crime fiction and introduced one of the world's best-known fictional characters, his contributions as a writer and as a public figure were astonishingly broad and diverse. He was a campaigner for justice, an advocate of sport, an indefatigable traveller, a propagandist for British wars, and a proselytiser of Spiritualism. His writing reflects this variety of experience. He wrote in the genres of science fiction, horror, ghost stories, medical realism, detective fiction, adventure fiction, military history, poetry, journalism, spiritual literature, and autobiography. There is a need for an accurate and authoritative edition of this body of writing, and the Edinburgh Conan Doyle will be unique as a series of critical editions of Conan Doyle's works.

He was a professional author, with no other source of income once he had made the momentous decision, in 1891, to retire from medicine and live by his pen. He belonged to a busy and sociable literary culture which served a well-educated reading public of unprecedented size. This public had an appetite for magazines, from the prestigious Cornhill to the popular Tit-Bits, and it was common for writers like Conan Doyle, with the help of the first generation of professional literary agents, to publish instalments of their work in periodical form before they appeared as books. Conan Doyle's own relationship with the Strand Magazine is wellknown, but his work appeared in scores of serial outlets, and his books too came out under the imprint of dozens of publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic.