A 40-page chapbook put together as a labour-of-love lockdown project, The Governess received recognition from the Arthur Conan Doyle Society in the form of its inaugural Doylean Honours Award for fiction. The presentation took place in a ceremony streamed live from Manhattan’s Mysterious Bookshop.

The story features Professor Challenger and is narrated by The Lost World‘s Edward Malone, and features the Professor in his later role as a spiritual investigator. Doyle, as we know, was fully on board with the Spiritualist movement. I’m not, but here as in my earlier novella In Gethsemane I find it a potent source of metaphor and human drama.

Stephen Gallagher