Arthur Conan Doyle's First Novel Published in UK

Before he earned worldwide acclaim as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, a struggling physician named Arthur Conan Doyle tried his hand at a different kind of fiction writing: a novel from the perspective of a 50-year-old man who is confined to his room when he has an attack of gout. The original manuscript of that novel, titled “The Narrative of John Smith,” was lost in the mail en route to Conan Doyle’s publishers, and though he later rewrote it from memory, the book was never published in his lifetime. Conan Doyle was later to remark: “My shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again – in print.”