In 1890, when still working as an obscure medical practitioner in Southsea, Arthur Conan Doyle bought a copy of Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills, which Macmillan had just published in London. He was immediately struck by the freshness of Kipling's way of telling stories. ‘I read it with delight,’ he admitted later,

Conan Doyle's chosen method of emulating Kipling's more excellent way was to spin a series of rough-and-ready tales around a single character, an investigator whose quests lead to surprising discoveries. Sherlock Holmes – amateur detective, man of the world, conceited, tobacco-smoking, given to lateral thinking – is a knight errant after the truth, but his exploits do not strictly fall within the sphere of quest romance. In 1912, however, Conan Doyle introduced his less celebrated counterpart, Professor Challenger. In The Lost World this splenetic scientist leads an expedition to the Brazilian rain forest to prove his contention that dinosaurs are still living on a remote and inaccessible plateau. He is accompanied by the narrator, Edward Malone, an ambitious Rugby-playing journalist, by a sceptical colleague called Professor Summerlee, and by Lord John Roxton, a benign and travelled man of the world, who have been entrusted with the job of reporting on the truth of his claims.

Attention has recently been redirected to this story, which has lent its title to a Steven Spielberg film. Historically it is interesting because it marks the point at which quest romance merges with two related forms: detective and science fiction. In part, The Lost World seems to have been designed as a reprise of the principal motifs of Victorian quest romance.