In the summer of 1927, three years before his death, Arthur Conan Doyle appeared on camera for the “Fox Newsreel,” and talked only about two things he was always asked about: how he came up with the character Sherlock Holmes and about his involvement with spiritualism. Today this seems completely shocking: we know him as the author of Sherlock Holmes, but as a proponent of spiritualism? Don't the detective's sharp intellect and the spiritualist's dabbling in nonsense contradict one another entirely? Not for Conan Doyle, one has to say. Two souls, alas, are dwelling inside his breast, along with some more equally curious ones. My own astonishment about the strange coexistence of what would obviously not seem to belong together also forms the impetus for this book. For it is not a focus that grew smaller, but rather it led to ever new areas, such as Conan Doyle's belief in photographs of fairies, as well as his efforts to publicize the horrors of the Congo (a crime against humanity committed through the colonialist politics of King Leopold II of Belgium), and the adventure novel The Lost World, which contains photo¬graphic illustrations of a journey through the world of the dinosaurs. Detective work as well as political commentaries and years of preaching the supposed revelations offered by spiritualism stand side by side with one another. The effort to explore and explain their specific logic is the task of this book. Indeed, one can ask, does Sherlock Holmes have something to do with spiritualism, and vice versa? And what does it mean when even now we visit his apart¬ment at 221B Baker Street, which never existed, or when watching the new “Sherlock Holmes” television series we are amazed at the miraculous expla¬nation of hard-to-solve cases? Does that not also have something to do with magic? Conan Doyle scoffed at the widely held belief that Sherlock Holmes existed for real, and yet he was proud to have created this exceptional figure whom today everyone knows. We will also consider what he had to say to his readers almost a century ago, because in retrospect this short film, the only film of him that has survived, is remarkable. Conan Doyle, with his Scottish accent and his walrus moustache, is a reliable witness to his own story with no hint of taking on airs.