Two of the reformers who led the effort to stop the carnage in Africa were Edmund Dene Morel and Roger Casement, upon whom Conan Doyle based the characters of Edward Malone and Lord John Roxton in The Lost World. Although these two were later discredited and Conan Doyle repudiated them, his involvement with the tragedy of the Belgian Congo not only influenced The Crime of the Congo, but also his classic, The Lost World. The book was intended as an expose of the situation in the so-called Congo Free State (labelled a rubber regime by Conan Doyle), an area occupied and designated as the personal property of Leopold II of Belgium and the serious human rights abuses occurring. Indigenous people in the region were being brutally exploited and tortured, particularly in the lucrative rubber trade.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote many more novels, stories and works of nonfiction than the immortal tales of Sherlock Holmes. His interests, also, were broad-ranging.