A New Light on Old Crimes E-Book

Arthur Conan Doyle

• Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 39

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In A New Light on Old Crimes, Arthur Conan Doyle revisits mysterious historical cases through a fictional lens, blending deductive logic with a flair for the uncanny. This short story challenges conventional explanations and imagines alternative resolutions—often infused with a supernatural or psychological twist. It's part crime fiction, part philosophical speculation.

Leseprobe

A New Light on Old Crimes

The Uncharted Coast Series

By: Arthur Conan Doyle

Prepared and edited by: Rafat Allam

Copyright © 2025 by Al-Mashreq eBookstore

First published in The Strand Magazine, January 1920

First book appearance in The Edge Of The Unknown, 1930

No part of this publication may be reproduced whole or in part in any form without the prior written permission of the author

Table of Contents

A New Light on Old Crimes

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Landmarks

Table of Contents

Cover

First published in The Strand Magazine, January 1920 First book appearance in The Edge Of The Unknown, 1930

1

Psychic science, though still in its infancy, has already reached a point where we can dissect many of those occurrences which were regarded as inexplicable in past ages, and can classify and even explain them—so far as any ultimate explanation of anything is possible. So long as gravity, electricity, magnetism, and so many other great natural forces are inexplicable one must not ask too much of the youngest—though it is also the oldest—of the sciences. But the progress made has been surprising—the more surprising since it has been done by a limited circle of students whose results have hardly reached the world at large, and have been greeted rather with incredulous contempt than with the appreciation which they deserve. So far have we advanced that of the eighty or ninety cases carefully detailed in Dale Owen’s Footfalls, published in 1859, we find now, seventy years later, that there is hardly one which cannot be classified and understood. It would be interesting, therefore, to survey some of those cases which stand on record in our law courts, and have been variously explained in the past as being either extraordinary coincidences or as interpositions of Providence. The latter phrase may well represent a fact, but people must learn that no such thing has ever been known as an interposition of Providence save through natural law, and that when it has seemed inexplicable and miraculous it is only because the law has not yet been understood. All miracles come under exact law, but the law, like all natural laws, is itself divine and miraculous.

We will endeavour in recounting these cases, which can only be done in the briefest fashion, to work from the simpler to the more complex—from that which may have depended upon the natural but undefined powers of the subconscious self, through all the range of clairvoyance and telepathy, until we come to that which seems beyond all question to be influenced by the spirit of the dead. There is one case, that of Owen Parfitt, of Shepton Mallet, in Somersetshire, which may form a starting-point, since it is really impossible to say whether it was psychic or not; but if it were not, it forms one of the most piquant mysteries which ever came before the British public.

This old fellow was a seaman, a kind of John Silver, who lived in the piratical days of the eighteenth century and finally settled down, upon what were usually considered to have been ill-gotten gains, about the year 1760, occupying a comfortable cottage on the edge of the little Somerset town. His sister kept house for him, but she was herself too infirm to look after the rheumatic old mariner, so a neighbour named Susanna Snook used to come in by the day and help to care for him. It was observed that Parfitt went periodically to Bristol, and that he returned with money, but how he gained it was his secret. He appears to have been a secretive and wicked old creature, with many strange tales of wild doings, some of which related to the West Coast of Africa, and possibly to the slave trade. Eventually his infirmity increased upon him. He could no longer get farther than his garden, and seldom left the great chair in which he was placed every day by the ministering Susanna Snook, just outside the porch of the cottage.