Round the Fire Stories

Arthur Conan Doyle

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Round the Fire Stories is a volume collecting 17 short stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle first published in 1908 by Smith, Elder & Co. (UK), and the same year by McClure (US). As Conan Doyle wrote in his preface, this volume include stories concerned with the grotesque and with the terrible.PrefaceIn a previous volume, The Green Flag, I have assembled a number of my stories which deal with warfare or with sport. In the present collection those have been brought together which are concerned with the grotesque and with the terrible - such tales as might well be read round the fire upon a winter’s night. This would be my ideal atmosphere for such stories, if an author might choose his time and place as an artist does the light and hanging of his picture. However, if they have the good fortune to give pleasure to any one, at any time or place, their author will be very satisfied. ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE.WlNDLESHAM, Crowborough.My friend, Lionel Dacre, lived in the Avenue de Wagram, Paris. His house was that small one, with the iron railings and grass plot in front of it, on the left-hand side as you pass down from the Arc de Triomphe. I fancy that it had been there long before the avenue was constructed, for the grey tiles were stained with lichens, and the walls were mildewed and discoloured with age. It looked a small house from the street, five windows in front, if I remember right, but it deepened into a single long chamber at the back. It was here that Dacre had that singular library of occult literature, and the fantastic curiosities which served as a hobby for himself, and an amusement for his friends. A wealthy man of refined and eccentric tastes, he had spent much of his life and fortune in gathering together what was said to be a unique private collection of Talmudic, cabalistic, and magical works, many of them of great rarity and value. His tastes leaned toward the marvellous and the monstrous, and I have heard that his experiments in the direction of the unknown have passed all the bounds of civilization and of decorum.
To his English friends he never alluded to such matters, and took the tone of the student and virtuoso but a Frenchman whose tastes were of the same nature has assured me that the worst excesses of the black mass have been perpetrated in that large and lofty hall, which is lined with the shelves of his books, and the cases of his museum. Dacre’s appearance was enough to show that his deep interest in these psychic matters was intellectual rather than spiritual.