In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Guy Boothby’s fiendish fin de siècle creation
What happens if you cross Professor Moriarty with his arch-nemesis Sherlock Holmes, add in a bit of Svengali from George du Maurier’s Trilby, a dash of archetypal James Bond villain, and a smidgen of master-conjuror and illusionist Derren Brown? The answer is Dr Nikola, the creation of the prolific Australian writer Guy Boothby, who was once a hugely popular author and the protégé of Rudyard Kipling.