The Lost World

"One of the aims of my little book On Conan Doyle is to urge people to explore Conan Doyle’s many wonderful non-Sherlockian works. Certainly the one that most people should start with is The Lost World . It introduces Professor George Edward Challenger, a self-important but wonderfully funny and committed scientist who discovers a plateau in a South American jungle where dinosaurs still roam the earth. This is based on some actual historical explorations that were going on at the time. The novel obviously inspired Jurassic Park . It is one of the great classic versions of a lost civilisation. Challenger is a larger than life, humorous character, and I stress repeatedly that Conan Doyle is often very funny. He himself, unlike many writers, was something of a man of action – a great sportsman who skied, climbed and hiked, and a man who served on a whaler as a ship’s doctor and attended the wounded during the Boer War. Sherlock Holmes represents an intellectual ideal. He’s a man who lives purely by his wit, who kowtows to no one and who disdains the conventions of society that most of us have to observe. When you read these books at 11 or 12, it’s clear that Holmes lives an ideal boy’s life. His best friend is his roommate. He has a mother figure to serve hot meals when he is hungry. He can shoot his gun inside his house, he can be as messy as he cares to be, he gets to wear lots of disguises and he can go out and have great adventures fighting the bad guys. Beyond that, as I said earlier, he is susceptible to all kinds of interpretations. He is the Hamlet of detective fiction."