The Land of Mist

The Land of Mist by Arthur Conan Doyle
Published: 1926
Narrated by: Barnaby Edwards
Series: Professor Challenger #3
Length: 09:39 (248 pages)

Arthur Conan Doyle was an interesting man. His Sherlock novels are the epitome of rational and logical thinking, yet he was deeply into spiritualism, attending seances and sittings with mediums. He was a member of multiple psychic research institutes, a founding member of one of them, and he wrote dozens of books and articles on the topic. He was famously duped by the Cottingley Fairies hoax and apparently drove his once-friend Harry Houdini to anger by insisting his illusions were real.

Many of his Sherlock plots revolve around the hint of a supernatural occurrence, only to have the true, decidedly natural, occurrence unveiled Scooby-Doo style at the end. The first couple of Professor Challenger novels were the same. They deal with problems of a more science-fiction nature, but there’s always the attempt to provide a scientific answer, even if it’s a real stretch. In The Land of Mist, it seems his two worlds finally collided.

This entire novel is essentially just an excuse to convince his readers of the validity of mediums. It’s a flimsy setup – Edward Malone, who we know from the previous books, and Professor Challenger’s daughter Enid set out to research and write an article on spiritualism for the paper. They are skeptical at first but begin to come around as they witness a string of psychic phenomenon. The entire story is just one seance after the next, with disbelievers attempting to frame altruistic mediums, which could potentially lead to them being incarcerated.

Most of the novel follows Edward and Enid, with very little from Professor Challenger until the end. It’s a shame, as he’s been one of my favourite characters since I discovered him a few years back in The Lost World. He’s pompous, overbearing, violent, short-tempered and a genius. He is almost ape-like in appearance with an imposing frame, booming voice, thick chest, giant hands and head, and a long beard so black as to almost appear slightly blue. A dark-haired, slightly more refined, Brian Blessed, I guess. He’s the sort of person that would be awful to be around in real life but is a blast to read about on the page.

You can really see Arthur Conan Doyle manipulating the plot as you read this one. I’m usually the last person to complain about supernatural elements in stories, but the characters felt more like tools for the point he was trying to make rather than their own entities. I love Professor Challenger and this felt like a bit of a disservice to me. I think I have just come to expect Doyle’s fiction to be grounded in reality, but I think it also doesn’t help that I’ve always found the idea of real-life mediums profiting off the grief of others really disgusting. Pay my rate and I’ll pretend to let you speak to your dead child. There’s just something wrong with that.

Despite all of this, I actually did enjoy the novel. I could see exactly what he was doing, it was impossible not to, but it didn’t ruin the book for me. I enjoyed following along with the characters as they learned more about spiritualism, and Professor Challenger, while slightly neutered, still had some great moments of his old self. I think it’s a testament to the author when he can write a novel with a plot like a glorified recruitment manual on a topic I don’t believe in, and in some ways find really distasteful, and still keep me amused until the end.

There are two short stories left in the Professor Challenger series, and I’m very curious now to see what happens in those.