65. The Stark Munro Letters (1895), with James Machin

Illustration by George Hutchinson for the Idler

This episode, we welcome to the podcast James Machin to talk about the new edition of The Stark Munro Letters (1895) he has edited for Edinburgh University Press.

You can read The Stark Munro Letters at the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia here.

You can listen to the episode below:

The episode will be uploaded to our YouTube channel soon, where you can listen with closed captions. In the meantime, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@doingsofdoyle

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About James Machin

James is a writer, researcher, and editor, whose recent books include the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle's version of The Stark Munro Letters (2024) and The Strange Stories of John Buchan for British Library Publishing (2025). He edited Faunus, the journal of The Friends of Arthur Machen, for over ten years, and has taught at Birkbeck (University of London), the Royal College of Art, and the University of Bedfordshire. He has recently commenced work on the Edinburgh Edition of Round the Fire Stories. 

The Stark Munro Letters (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)

The first new edition of The Stark Munro Letters since the early 1980s

• Contains detailed introduction and scholarly apparatus

• Extensive notes explore the historical and biographical references

• Appendixes that collect original transcriptions of previously inaccessible archival material

• Ideal for students and scholars interested in Arthur Conan Doyle, medical fiction, popular fiction, autobiographical fiction, and epistolary fiction

This is the first scholarly edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s epistolary novel, originally serialised in the Idler, 1894–95, and long out of print. With its first-hand testimony of the life of a doctor at the outset of his career in the late nineteenth century, The Stark Munro Letters will appeal to anyone with an interest in medical history. It is based on his experiences during the eight years he spent as a General Practitioner, before becoming a professional author in 1890. By some way the most autobiographical of Conan Doyle’s novels—written at the height of Holmes’s popularity—it is also the most personal in terms of presenting his worldview during his formative years, including ruminations on moral philosophy, religion, science, and evolutionary theory. Moreover, it is entertaining and incredibly vivid—a contemporary critic described the mercurial Cullingworth as ‘one of the finest characters Dr. Doyle has yet drawn’.

Source: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-stark-munro-letters.html  

Bibliography

The Strange Stories of John Buchan (British Library, 2025)

British Weird: Selected Short Fiction 1893 – 1937 (Handheld Classics, 2020)

Faunus: The Decorative Imagination of Arthur Machen (Strange Attractor Press, 2019)

Of Mud and Flame: A Penda's Fen Sourcebook (MIT Press, 2019)

Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

The Cosy Room and Other Stories (Tartarus Press, 2017) 

Also mentioned

Margie Deck (ed), Sherlock Holmes Into The Fire (Belanger Books, 2025) which you can find at Amazon.  

Next time on Doings of Doyle

We continue with Conan Doyle’s medical fiction with a related comic tale, ‘Crabbe’s Practice’ (1884). You can read the story here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our supporters on Patreon and Paypal.

Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.

Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ 

YouTube video created by @headlinerapp.