Some years ago, the modern-day fairy hoaxer Dan Baines invited me to speak at Doomsday - a wonderfully odd gathering where stage magicians swap illusions, secrets, and sleight-of-hand wizardry. 

I told him I knew absolutely nothing about stage magic - whether it involved doves, rabbits, or anything remotely resembling a top hat. But Dan wasn’t interested in tricks. He wanted something altogether different: a palate cleanser. A curveball.

This, after all, was the man who had briefly convinced the world that a dog walker (isn’t it always?) had discovered the mummified corpse of a winged fairy. Scientists baffled. Hollow bones. Possible flight. For a time, people genuinely wondered. Dan had pulled off a spectacular bit of mischief.

Meanwhile, I was busy running The Legendary Faery Festival in North Wales - still going strong, and now the largest fairy-themed event in the UK. So yes, fairies were very much our shared language.

My talk began with five simple words: What about the Cottingley Fairies?

That question sent me to The Brotherton Library, where I started digging. It didn’t take long before I uncovered something curious: a handful of intriguing anomalies… and a great many lies.

The stage for the reveal couldn’t have been better. At Sneaton Castle, perched high above the cliffs of Dracula’s own Whitby, I presented my findings to a room full of magicians - and, somewhat unexpectedly, Reece Shearsmith of The League of Gentlemen and Inside No. 9.

The response was electric. What began as a single talk soon grew into the cover story - and six full pages - of Fortean Times in 2017. But the Cottingley photographs refused to sit quietly in history. They kept whispering new secrets...

At one point, someone joked that I had “out-Sherlocked Sherlock.” That throwaway remark stuck. By 2022–23, I had reimagined the entire mystery - this time placing Sherlock Holmes at the centre, following the same trail of clues I had. The result was a stage play: Sherlock Holmes and The Man Who Believed in Fairies.

Playwright and former critic Andrew Rissik loved it, passing it on to Robert Gore Langton, who featured it in The Spectator in July 2024.

Now, I had never written - let alone produced - a full-length play before. But that didn’t stop me. I gathered four professional actors, a sound and lighting technician, and somehow raised the not-insignificant budget needed to take it to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Most people thought it couldn’t be done. They may have had a point - the performance space was far from ideal - but still, around seven hundred people came to see it. Seven hundred!

By October 2025, the play was touring: Malvern Theatres, Theatre Royal Bath, and Greenwich Theatre. At Greenwich, I was especially pleased to see members of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London turn out in force, having first caught the show in Edinburgh.

Turning the play into a novel was the next logical step. It allowed me to 'head-hop' between characters and reveal their innermost thoughts. Certain scenes only alluded to in the stage play are fully fleshed out in the book's 225 pages.

As for the original Cottingley photographs - they’re all available online if you go looking. The one from The Sphere magazine is a little harder to track down, but it’s out there. So too is Dot Inman’s photograph, though the original sits in The Brotherton Library, somewhat carelessly mislabelled as Mrs. Inman’s Fairy Photograph. Dot never married.

I was told that photograph has almost no provenance. No one at the library knows quite where it came from.

But then again - according to my version of events - it was taken by Sherlock Holmes himself.

In truth, Arthur Conan Doyle knew of it long before this book suggests. But like Doyle, I’ve always had a fondness for a certain principle:

Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.