Dr. Nikola's Experiment

Boothby was once well known for his series of novels about Doctor Nikola, an occultist anti-hero seeking immortality and world domination. The adventures of Nikola were launched with the first episode of A Bid for Fortune which was serialised in The Windsor Magazine (a rival to The Strand Magazine). Nikola is described as dressing in "faultless evening dress, slender, having dark peculiar eyes and dark hair, and white toad-coloured skin." He lives in a bungalow on the Rue de Lafayette in Shanghai. Stanley L. Wood often illustrated the Nikola stories and his portraits depict Dr Nikola in white cravat and fur coat, with his perennial companion, the black cat Apollyon (named after a dark angel) – huge, baleful, gleaming-eyed – perched on Nikola's shoulder. Nikola – cosmopolitan, cultivated, universally feared – is highly intelligent but unscrupulous. John Clute writes that " The heart of the series is devoted to the Doctor's convoluted search for a Tibetan process that will resuscitate the dead and ensure immortality in the living, and there are some hints that – unhampered by compunctions, armed with psi powers and blessed with a powerful experimental intellect – he may have reached his goal."