Authors are bad judges of their work. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is an immortal creation. But Doyle thought his greatest book was The White Company — a medieval adventure into which he had poured a cornucopia of research. The line, however, from research-effort to literary-reward is rarely true, straight or constant, and in this case Doyle, to be frank, strayed very far into the province of the duds. To be sure, one can, if one has the stamina and the imagination, lift from the pages of The White Company insights into peasant politics, how common soldiers jostled along … Continue reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Case of the Gullible Deist