The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire

Book excerpt: Mr. Robert Ferguson thinks his wife might be a vampire. He’s caught her sucking their baby’s neck and since that discovery, she has locked herself in her room, only allowing their Peruvian maid to bring her food. Her behaviour had been strange before that and she had struck Ferguson’s son from an earlier marriage twice. The boy, fifteen, has been left handicapped by a childhood accident. Holmes is immediately convinced he has solved the case upon hearing the story but he follows Ferguson back home to clear the mystery. "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" is part of "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes". Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Scotland and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. After his studies, he worked as a ship’s surgeon on various boats. During the Second Boer War, he was an army doctor in South Africa. When he came back to the United Kingdom, he opened his own practice and started writing crime books. He is best known for his thrilling stories about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He published four novels and more than 50 short-stories starring the detective and Dr Watson, and they play an important role in the history of crime fiction. Other than the Sherlock Holmes series, Doyle wrote around thirty more books, in genres such as science-fiction, fantasy, historical novels, but also poetry, plays, and non-fiction.