Arthur Conan Doyle (Mark Frost) Books in Order

Mark Frost's Arthur Conan Doyle books take a playful idea and make it dark, fast, and surprisingly creepy. What if the future creator of Sherlock Holmes stumbled into the kind of case Holmes himself might later solve, only messier, more occult, and much more dangerous? In these novels, Doyle begins as a young doctor and struggling writer with a skeptical mind, but he is quickly pulled into murders, secret societies, and events that keep resisting any neat rational explanation.

The List of Seven sets the tone. A séance in Victorian London becomes the doorway into a conspiracy involving the Dark Brotherhood, and Doyle is rescued by Jack Sparks, a mysterious operative who claims to work for Queen Victoria. Sparks is sharp, fearless, and never entirely easy to read. Part of the fun is watching Frost suggest that this partnership may help explain how Doyle later imagines Sherlock Holmes, while still keeping Doyle very much his own character, intelligent, doubtful, and always trying to reason his way through chaos.

These are Sherlock-adjacent books, but they have more soot and menace in them.

The setting does a lot of work. Frost leans into gaslight London, rough streets, train journeys, country houses, hidden rooms, and the sense that the modern world is arriving while older, stranger beliefs refuse to go quietly. Doyle keeps looking for the trick behind the terror, the practical answer behind the ritual, which gives the series a steady push and pull between reason and the uncanny. Even when the books move at pulp-thriller speed, that argument between skepticism and fear stays at the center.

The Six Messiahs widens the story. By 1894 Doyle is famous, traveling to America on book tour and secretly investigating the disappearance of sacred texts when murder strikes again. Jack Sparks returns, damaged but still dangerous, and the story grows from one secret cabal into something broader and more apocalyptic. The stakes become more political and spiritual, but the series still works because it stays anchored in the partnership. Doyle brings curiosity, doubt, and persistence. Sparks brings action, secrecy, and the sense that he may know more than he is willing to say.

What readers should expect, then, is a blend of historical adventure, occult thriller, and Conan Doyle remix. The books are full of pursuit, disguise, coded motives, and big reveals, yet they never lose the central joke and pleasure of the setup, that Doyle may be living through the kind of legend he will later turn into fiction. If you like Victorian mysteries but want more conspiracy, more action, and a stronger brush with the supernatural, this series is a good fit. It feels like a secret history running beside the better-known one.