“The Los Amigos Fiasco” was written by Arthur Conan Doyle and first appeared in The Idler (Nov. 1892). Although Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is known today primarily for The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, he was a competent professional writer who produced a range of material, his best work being his historical adventures rather than his mysteries. “The Los Amigos Fiasco” is typical of Conan Doyle’s science fiction.

In the town of Los Amigos, somewhere in the American Southwest, the townspeople are eager to put their “great electrical generating gear”¹ to use in executing someone. When Duncan Warner, “murderer, train robber and road agent...a man beyond the pale of human pity,”² falls into their hands, they are eager to electrocute him. The town doctor argues against it, suspecting that they will use too much electricity, but he is overruled. What happens confirms the doctor's suspicions; the electricity increases Warner's “vitality until he can defy death for centuries...it will take the wear of hundreds of years to exhaust the enormous nervous energy”³ with which he has been infused. Warner is literally unkillable. He survives repeated attempts at electrocution, hanging, and even six bullets through the body, his only response to this being "'Coats must be cheap where you come from,' said he. 'Thirty dollars it cost me, and look at it now. The six holes in front are bad enough, but four of the balls have passed out, and a pretty state the back must be in.'”⁴

The story ends with the law in Los Amigos determining to imprison him permanently, as he is invulnerable and apparently does not age.

“The Los Amigos Fiasco” is hardly one of Conan Doyle’s more important stories, but it does occupy a peculiar position in the history of superhero fiction. Like Wells’ “A New Accelerator,” “The Los Amigos Fiasco” appeared at a time when the idea of a person with superhuman powers and abilities was an accepted one in fantastika⁵ and the superhuman powers and abilities were seen as just another trope for authors to use. Unlike the protagonists of “A New Accelerator,” however, it is the villain of “The Los Amigos Fiasco” who gains the superpowers. This was not an unusual act for authors of fantastika to take; the idea of a villain with superpowers goes back at least to 1723, with Thomas-Simon Gueullete’s Aventures Merveilleuses du Mandarin Fum-Hoam, the titular character of which has a range of magical powers, “and can be seen as a precursor to an influence on Vathek [see: Vathek] himself.”⁶ Aventures Merveilleuses, an attempt by a French author to write an Arabian Nights-style Arabian Fantasy, was influential on the Arabesque Gothics, including Vathek, which was in turn influential on the more mainstream Gothics. Throughout the nineteenth century numerous works featured superpowered villains: Victor Hugo’s Hans of Iceland, George Lippard’s The Quaker City, Charles Averill’s The Mexican Ranchero, and the Nick Carter Mysteries featuring Dr. Quartz (see: The Dr. Quartz Mysteries), among a number of others.⁷ By the time “The Los Amigos Fiasco” was written, the superpowered villain was just another plot device for authors to use.

“The Los Amigos Fiasco,” however, was arguably the first of these stories to be set in the modern era and to use scientific principles to explain the supervillain’s superpowers. The Dr. Quartz stories (from 1891-1927) and H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897) were some of the others, but they came after “The Los Amigos Fiasco.” Each of these works were influential on later writers–“The Los Amigos Fiasco” and The Invisible Man because of the fame of their authors, the Dr. Quartz stories because of their sizable reading audience–and the scientifically superpowered villain of the pulps and comic books can trace their origin to those “The Los Amigos Fiasco,” the Dr. Quartz stories, and The Invisible Man.

“The Los Amigos Fiasco” is a brisk tale of surprising droll humor, and of note for its place in popular culture history.

Print: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’: Weird and Imaginative Fiction. Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press, 2012.

¹ Arthur Conan Doyle, Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 263.

² Conan Doyle, Round the Red Lamp, 264.

³ Conan Doyle, Round the Red Lamp, 274.

⁴ Conan Doyle, Round the Red Lamp, 274.

⁵ I’m taking “fantastika” from John Clute, who defines it as “A convenient shorthand term employed and promoted by John Clute since 2007 to describe the armamentarium of the fantastic in literature as a whole, encompassing science fiction, Fantasy, fantastic horror and their various subgenres.” John Clute and David R. Langford, “Fantastika,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, accessed Jan. 22, 2019, http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/fantastika

⁶ Nevins, Evolution of the Costumed Avenger, 128.

⁷ See Nevins, The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger, 126-130 for more on superpowered villains of the nineteenth century.