Like his late colleague, Mitropoulos, he reads mystery stories, in particular Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

A more obvious influence on the early Poirot stories is that of Arthur Conan Doyle.

For his part Conan Doyle acknowledged basing his detective stories on the model of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, and his anonymous narrator, and basing his character Sherlock Holmes on Joseph Bell, who in his use of " ratiocination " prefigured Poirot's reliance on his " little grey cells ".

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jeremy Bentham, Florence Nightingale and even Queen Victoria are reputed to have stayed there, although there is no real evidence for this.

The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine.

Conan Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena.

Author and prominent Spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle learned of the photographs from the editor of the Spiritualists ' publication Light.

Conan Doyle contacted Gardner in June 1920 to determine the background to the photographs, and wrote to Elsie and her father to request permission from the latter to use the prints in his article.

Arthur Wright was " obviously impressed " that Conan Doyle was involved, and gave his permission for publication, but he refused payment on the grounds that, if genuine, the images should not be " soiled " by money.

Gardner and Conan Doyle sought a second expert opinion from the photographic company Kodak.

Gardner and Conan Doyle, perhaps rather optimistically, interpreted the results of the three expert evaluations as two in favour of the photographs ' authenticity and one against.

Conan Doyle also showed the photographs to the physicist and pioneering psychical researcher Sir Oliver Lodge, who believed the photographs to be fake.

Conan Doyle was preoccupied with organising an imminent lecture tour of Australia, and in July 1920, sent Gardner to meet the Wright family.

The plates were packed in cotton wool and returned to Gardner in London, who sent an " ecstatic " telegram to Conan Doyle, by then in Melbourne.

Conan Doyle wrote back:

An enthusiastic and committed Spiritualist, Conan Doyle hoped that if the photographs convinced the public of the existence of fairies, then they might more readily accept other psychic phenomena.

The historical novelist and poet Maurice Hewlett published a series of articles in the literary journal John O ' London's Weekly, in which he concluded: " And knowing children, and knowing that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has legs, I decide that the Miss Carpenters have pulled one of them.

Conan Doyle used the later photographs in 1921 to illustrate a second article in The Strand, in which he described other accounts of fairy sightings.

But the cousins disagreed about the fifth and final photograph, which Conan Doyle in his The Coming of the Fairies described in this way:

In a 1985 interview on Yorkshire Television's Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, Elsie said that she and Frances were too embarrassed to admit the truth after fooling Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes: " Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet.

Frances ' daughter, Christine Lynch, appeared in an episode of the television programme Antiques Roadshow in Belfast, broadcast on BBC One in January 2009, with the photographs and one of the cameras given to the girls by Conan Doyle.

Category: Arthur Conan Doyle

During this trip, he further conceived the character of Conan and also wrote the poem " Cimmeria ", much of which echoes specific passages in Plutarch's Lives.

* Arthur Conan Doyle made reference to ' Princetown Prison ' in four stories that he wrote between 1890 and 1903.

However, some years later Bell wrote in a letter to Conan Doyle: " you are yourself Sherlock Holmes and well you know it.

However, there were international protests particularly in Britain and the United States in 1903-04 spearheaded mainly by Edmund Dene Morel and British diplomat / Irish patriot Roger Casement, whose 1904 report on the Congo condemned the practice, as well as famous writers such as Mark Twain ( who wrote King Leopold's Soliloquy ) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in his 1904 novel The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, " It seemed to be one of those senseless acts of Hooliganism which occur from time to time, and it was reported to the constable on the beat as such ".

The pairs of characters were very much alike and Roy Thomas, who wrote the original Conan comics, made no secret that it was his intention to create characters that were a tribute to Fritz Leiber's creations.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story about his celebrated sleuth Sherlock Holmes which features a fingerprint: The Norwood Builder is a 1903 Sherlock Holmes short story set in 1894 and involves the discovery of a bloody fingerprint which helps Holmes to expose the real criminal and free his client.

While there, he wrote a Conan Doyle spoof, " A Double-Barreled Detective Story ".

After seeing it attributed in the Sunday Dispatch to Arthur Conan Doyle, Whitaker wrote a letter to Denis Conan Doyle explaining the true authorship.

Adrian threatened criminal proceedings against Pearson's " fakeography ", and wrote an article in protest, and later a book The True Conan Doyle ( John Murray, 1945 ).

He wrote a ( non-Conan ) adventure story, " Blood of Belshazzar " which Roy Thomas adapted into a Conan story in Marvel Comics ' Conan the Barbarian # 27 as " The Blood of Bel-Hissar ".

The year marked several publications on the literarily influential Boer Wars: Winston Churchill, the future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and a major Allied political figure in World War II penned a memoir, Ian Hamilton's March, describing his experiences accompanying the British army during the Second Boer War, and Arthur Conan Doyle ( famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes ) wrote on the subject in his The Great Boer War.

Arthur Conan Doyle in his book The New Revelation ( 1918 ) wrote that automatic writing occurs either by the writers subconscious or by external spirits operating through the writer.

* With John Lurie, Shore wrote the theme song for Late Night with Conan O ' Brien.

He co-wrote the first two Dirty Harry films and Apocalypse Now and wrote and directed Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn.

It is also rumoured to have been the prototype for The Hound of the Baskervilles as Conan Doyle is known to have stayed at nearby Hergest Hall shortly before he wrote the novel.

* When Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Final Problem he fully intended to kill off Sherlock Holmes and write no further books and stories about him.

While on a writers ' strike from Saturday Night Live following the 1987 – 88 season, Smigel wrote for an improvisational comedy revue in Chicago with fellow SNL writers Bob Odenkirk and Conan O ' Brien called Happy Happy Good Show.

In 2003, Busiek began a new Conan series for Dark Horse Comics, which he wrote for four years.

* Only months after the release of Conan the Barbarian in 1982, D ' Amato wrote, directed, and released Ator the Invincible about a Scandinavian barbarian who goes on an epic quest against fantasy monsters to save his beloved.