Recently, I started reading David Grann’s true account of the one time famous Amazon explorer Englishman Percy Fawcett and his attempts to find a lost city in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest.

Entitled The Lost City of Z, the book describes the early Twentieth Century zeal for exploration and recording of all this is unknown in nature. Along the way, Grann documents the irresistible allure of the jungle which has doomed many early explorers to horrific deaths and disappearances (most famously, Fawcett himself disappeared, spurring Grann to be the last in a long line of the curious, determined to discover what ever happened to him)

What does all this have to do with Arthur Conan Doyle? Well, it is strongly suspected that the brave and at times ridiculously stoic Fawcett was the basis for Doyle’s character Lord John Roxton in The Lost World published in 1912. Doyle and Fawcett also new each other in real life. (As a side note: H Rider Haggard, the author of King Solomon’s Mines was also friends with Fawcett)

I read The Lost World last year, the first book or story I have ever read by Doyle and really quite enjoyed it. But I didn’t think too much about it when I casually chose for my next book Arthur and George by Julian Barnes. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005, it is the story of Arthur Conan Doyle and his touching friendship with a wrongly accused man of Indian descent named George.

The Doyle connection was hard to miss when the next book I chose, was Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution.  Set in England in 1944, there is every reason to suspect that the character referred to as only “the old man” is intended to be a much older, reclusive Sherlock Holmes but it is never confirmed.

So in the span of a year or so, I’ve read four books which have obvious connections to Arthur Conan Doyle and not one of them was an actual Sherlock Holmes mystery which he is so famous for.  It’s nothing new to write that the more you read, the more you know, but I admit to really enjoying when one historical event, or character, or idea or whatever,  found in one book, turns up later in others. The connections appeal to me.

Another example of this is: The Lost City of Z deals in great detail with the role of the Royal Geographic Society’s (RGS) early attempts to map and explore the entire planet.  Oddly, since this is only a passing interest of mine, this is the second book I read recently which discusses the RGS.  The book Lost on Everest deals with another lost explorer from the 1920s – George Mallory (the man who famously claimed he wanted to climb Everest “because it was there”). To add to this, when I was home visiting my parents recently, I noticed my mother was reading Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer which unbeknownst to me was a novel about the mysterious disappearance of (you guessed it) George Mallory.