His earliest extant fiction, "The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe", was unsuccessfully submitted to Blackwood's Magazine.[3] His first published piece, "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley", a story set in South Africa, was printed in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal on 6 September 1879.[9][20] On 20 September 1879, he published his first academic article, "Gelsemium as a Poison" in the British Medical Journal,[9][21][22] a study which The Daily Telegraph regarded as potentially useful in a 21st-century murder investigation.[23]