Dangerous Work by Arthur Conan Doyle: review Sometimes he'd find a pair of bloody flippers he'd absent-mindedly stuffed in his pockets. Yet he wrote home proudly to his mother: "I just feel as if I could go anywhere or do anything. I'm sure I could go anywhere and eat anything. When the Hope did come upon a whale, he relished the excitement of the chase. "We lanced her deep in the neck," he wrote as a whale was attacked. She gave a sort of shudder and started off at a great rate. The animal swam to an ice floe and tried to hide beneath it, but the men flushed it out, "and then the fun began." For all that, he exhibited a sense of deep pity. "Amid all the excitement one's sympathies lie with the poor hunted creature," he wrote. The whale has a small eye, little larger than that of a bullock; but I cannot easily forget the mute expostulation which I read in one, as it dimmed over in death within hand's touch of me. On its six-month voyage, the Hope culled 3,600 seals, five polar bears, two narwhals, countless seabirds - but just two whales. It was a disaster in financial (and environmental) terms. But for Conan Doyle, it was an adventure which would seed his imagination. Two of his whaling-inspired stories, "The Adventure of Black Peter," in which the victim is murdered with a harpoon, and the eerie ghost story, "The Captain of the Pole-Star," are reprinted in this beautiful and lavish volume. But there's also an unexplored, Gothic theme here, one which reaches back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - which begins and ends on a whale ship, and which Conan Doyle discusses with the captain on his whale ship - to Edgar Allan Poe, the most important literary influence on Conan Doyle, whose The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is set on a whaler. And surely Sherlock Holmes would have appreciated the fact that this literary trail culminated in Dracula, written by Bram Stoker - whose cousin happened to be Arthur Conan Doyle. Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure Arthur Conan Doyle British Library, £25, 368pp