Hello and welcome to Episode 63. This episode we travel to the very north of mainland Scotland where one man’s solitude is interrupted by two mysterious castaways, in ‘The Man from Archangel’ from 1885.

You can read the story here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Man_from_Archangel

Or listen to a Librivox reading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts2yXxclU-c

The episode will be uploaded to our YouTube channel soon, where you can listen with closed captions. In the meantime, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@doingsofdoyle

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Synopsis

Having come into an unexpected inheritance, the morose and misanthropic John McVittie is able to give up his unrewarding legal practice in the English Midlands and retire to a remote coastal estate in Caithness in eastern Scotland. Here he pursues his esoteric scientific and philosophic interests, with only his aged housekeeper for company. But his quiet existence is disrupted when a Russian schooner is wrecked in a storm and McVittie rescues a young woman from the doomed ship. Apparently, however, she is not the only survivor as shortly afterwards McVittie discovers that his lonely house is under observation from a mysterious bearded stranger…

Next time on Doings of Doyle…

We discuss ACD’s unconventional ghost story, ‘The Story of the Brown Hand’ (1898), from his Round the Fire Stories.

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/

YouTube video created by @headlinerapp.