The letter, sent by the cabal, takes Doyle to a sÇance where a demon manifests and several are slain, and from which Doyle escapes with the help of a mysterious dynamo who calls himself Jack Sparks-though, for his deductive powers, violin playing, and cocaine addiction, he might just as well be called ``Holmes.'' Sparks tells Doyle of the 7 and of their leader, Alexander Sparks, Jack's own brother and nemesis, the crime lord of London (i.e., Moriarity). It's this interest that has prompted Doyle to write about a ``Dark Brotherhood'' in a novel that's attracted the attention of the ``7,'' a real-life cabal of the black arts.

and writer when he gets an anonymous letter imploring him to save ``an innocent's life'' from ``fraudulent'' practitioners of the ``spiritual arts''-a letter couched in the same Victorian language that Frost uses to tell his tale, and one appealing to the doctor's interest in psychic phenomena. Not so, imagines Frost (co-creator of Twin Peaks) in his exhilarating, exuberantly melodramatic first novel: Holmes's real template was one Jack Sparks, Queen Victoria's most secret agent, who enlisted Doyle as his Watson to combat a conspiracy aimed at nothing less than incarnating Satan in human form.

History has it that Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes on his med-school teacher Dr.

The list of 7 mark frost