The Tragedy of the Korosko

A little-remembered novel from one of the pioneers of genre fiction, this 1898 concoction from the creator of Sherlock Holmes gives us a group of Westerners on holiday in the Middle East who are taken hostage while on a cruise down the Nile. What do their captors want? The terrorists will either kill them. or forcibly convert them to Islam. This "desert drama" is high adventure at its pulpy best, and still surprisingly relevant today. Scottish surgeon and political activist SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (1859-1930) turned his passions into stories and novels, producing fiction and nonfiction works sometimes controversial (The Great Boer War, 1900), sometimes fanciful (The Coming of the Fairies, 1922), and sometimes legendary (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892).