The Captain of the Polestar »

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was both a doctor and a believer in spirits, which may partly explain why his Sherlock Holmes is one of literature's most beloved detectives: Holmes always approaches his cases with the gentility and logic of a scientist, but the stories are suffused with an aura of the supernatural. Narrated by devoted assistant Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes's adventures were so addictive that fans protested the master deducer's "death" in 1893 and Doyle had to resurrect him.

This morning I saw a star twinkling just over the fore-yard the first since the beginning of May. There is considerable discontent among the crew many of whom are anxious to get back home to be in time for the herring season when labour always commands a high price upon the Scotch coast.

The Washington Post - Dennis Drabelle

The Captain of the "Pole-Star": Weird and Imaginative Fiction, edited by Christopher and Barbara Roden, shows that, at least literarily speaking, the supernatural was not an entirely new phase in Conan Doyle's development. Here are ghost stories, science fiction and horror stories, including the title piece, about a voyage to the far north on a boat captained by a man with "a curious way of twitching his limbs." It doesn't take long for the narrator to note in his journal, "My deliberate opinion is that we are commanded by a madman."