Hello and welcome to Episode 56. Today, we journey to Conan Doyle’s hometown of Edinburgh where a young man falls foul of a mysterious, mesmeric beauty in ‘John Barrington Cowles’ (1884).

Read the story here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/John_Barrington_Cowles

You can read the show notes here: https://www.doingsofdoyle.com/2024/10/56-john-barrington-cowles-1884.html

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Synopsis

At Edinburgh University in 1879, a friendship is formed between two medical students, Robert Armitage and John Barrington Cowles. Beyond his scientific pursuits and achievements, Cowles is also interested in art and, at an exhibition at the Scottish Academy, his attention is drawn towards a beautiful woman named Kate Northcott. She, however, is already promised in marriage to a law student named Reeves, although not for long. Her fiancé dies in strange circumstances and she and Cowles are soon engaged. But, as Armitage discovers, she is a woman with a veiled and sinister past which matches her forceful and mysteriously magnetic personality. What is her secret and how can her hold over his friend be broken?

Next time

We embark on our exploration of the Conan Doyle classic The Lost World (1912), taking the story to the point where our intrepid crew travel to South America. You can read it here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Lost_World

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our supporters on Patreon and Paypal.

Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.

Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.