The man who invented the ultimate avatar of cold deduction spent his fortune promoting psychic mediums, attended seances, and publicly defended photographs of fairies propped up with hatpins. This episode examines the paradox of Arthur Conan Doyle, a trained physician, Arctic whaler, athlete, and real-life crusader for justice whose own story has been eclipsed by his fictional detective.

We begin in Edinburgh with an alcoholic father who was eventually committed, the brutal Jesuit school at Stonyhurst that pushed him toward agnosticism, and Professor Joseph Bell, whose diagnostic feats became the Sherlock method. We follow his voyage on the whaler Hope, the empty Southsea practice that drove him to write A Study in Scarlet in three weeks, the sale of the copyright for 25 pounds, his resentment of his own creation, the Reichenbach Falls killing that sent readers into mourning, and his real investigations that freed George Edalji and Oscar Slater. Finally we look at the wartime losses that pushed him into spiritualism and the bitter feud with Harry Houdini.

• How Joseph Bell deduced patients’ occupations and travels from calluses, clothing, and mud
• Why Doyle considered the detective stories cheap pulp and wanted to be remembered for The White Company
• Goalkeeping under a pseudonym, bowling out W.G. Grace, judging bodybuilding, and introducing skiing to Britain
• How the Edalji case contributed to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907
• Why Doyle insisted Houdini had supernatural powers even as Houdini explained his tricks