The upside of creating the world’s most famous (and smuggest) detective is celebrity, fortune and a knighthood; the downside is that you’re stuck with him. In desperation Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes off, but his publisher insisted he resurrect him.
In 1912, twenty years after his Baker Street sleuth first appeared on the Victorian crime scene, Conan Doyle wrote The Lost World, his best and last non-Sherlock Holmes novel. Cross Scoop with Jurassic Park and you’re getting close. Lovesick young reporter Edward Malone is briskly informed by Gladys that if he wants to marry her he has first to prove his heroism, for it is her wish to bask in the reflected glory of a husband whose great deeds are universally acclaimed. Malone’s kindly news editor suggests he expose a bogus explorer, one Professor Challenger who claims to have stumbled across a lost civilisation in Brazil. Perched on an inaccessible plateau roughly the size and shape of Sussex at the back end of the Amazon, it is inhabited by prehistoric monsters and primitive tribes. Alas, all the evidence – the bones, hides, feathers etc – were lost on the return journey. A second debunking expedition is proposed. Glen McReady reads this good old-fashioned ripping yarn with relish. I liked the pterodactyls roaring as fearsomely as Hendon aerodrome on a race day.

In 1912, Doyle took his Victorian readers deep into the South American jungles where, high atop a treacherous plateau, a small band of British explorers encountered a terrifying world of prehistoric creatures long thought lost to the sands of time. The adventurers included a young newspaper reporter, Ed Malone; the swashbuckling aristocrat, Lord Roxton; the skeptical scientist, Professor Summerlee; and the brilliant and bombastic Professor Challenger, who leads the party. Doyle unfolds high adventure at its best with fantastic encounters with pterodactyls, stegosaurs and cunning ape-men. Glen McCready’s performance captures the time and tone of Doyle’s material perfectly without straying into melodrama. He nicely balances Malone’s sense of youthful wonder with the professors’ scientific pragmatism, while fully exploiting the humor spread strategically throughout, planting numerous chuckles among the thrills. McCready’s entertaining reading more than fulfils the author’s introductory wish to ‘give one hour of joy to the boy who’s half a man, or the man who’s half a boy.’

In this science fiction thriller about a death-defying search for dinosaurs in the uncharted depths of South America, Conan Doyle drew on contemporary interest in palaeontology and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Young journalist Edward has joined Professor Challenger’s expedition to prove himself worthy of his beloved Gladys’s hand, but his romanticism is soon rocked by the terrifying dangers of pterodactyls and ape men. As Thinking Boy’s Adventure it can’t be beaten – and the narrator sounds uncannily like a driven nineteenth-century adventurer himself!