The sad coda to Arthur Conan Doyle’s great career was his belief in spiritualism. The man responsible for the famous line “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” spent his final years clinging to every impossibility that he found. This book is his account of Cottingley Fairies incident, including his article in The Strand Magazine, and the work of Doyle and his partner Edward Gardner in investigating the claims.

As a primary source, it’s an interesting look inside the mind of man desperately trying to prove the truth of something ignored by science. It’s rather interesting to see the focus on various forms of darkroom trickery, and not the obvious explanation that the fairies are painted cardstock cleverly posed. There are some interesting glimpses of English theosophy, but mostly the impression that they’re willing to believe in anything other than mundane reality; etheric matter, phasic vibrations, auras, and of course tiny dancing woodland elves in rich taxonomy. The saddest chapter is one where Doyle sends another friend, a “Sergeant Tank” with the gift of clairvoyance to Cottingley, and he reports tons of fairies in great detail without a single photograph.

This is an important book, for say an academic studying cryptozoology, or cultural research on belief in the supernatural, but there’s little pleasure and less information in reading it.