Mike Ashley is the author and editor of more than one hundred books and one of the foremost historians of popular fiction with a specialism for rooting out rare short stories. His Tales of the Weird anthologies include Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories and Doorway to Dilemma: Bewildering Tales of Dark Fantasy. < p/> Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a British writer, physician and spiritualist, world famous today as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Along with detective stories, he wrote numerous tales of historical events and fictional expeditions such as the influential novel of prehistoric discovery The Lost World.