Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a British writer and physician, born in Edinburgh on 22 May 1859 and dead on 7 July 1930. He came of age in Victorian Britain and worked first in medicine, studying at the University of Edinburgh Medical School from 1876 to 1881. While still a student, he began publishing fiction and medical writing. He later served as doctor and surgeon on two sea voyages before trying to build a medical practice in Portsmouth, which did not succeed.

Doyle is best known for creating Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, the fictional consulting detective and his assistant whose four novels and fifty-six short stories became milestones in crime fiction. The first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887. In 1891, “A Scandal in Bohemia” began a run of twenty-four monthly Holmes stories in The Strand Magazine, making Doyle one of the most famous and highly paid authors of his time. Though he grew ambivalent about Holmes and killed him in “The Final Problem” in 1893, public outcry brought the detective back in The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901. Doyle continued writing Holmes stories until 1927.

Holmes was only one part of Doyle’s output. He produced more than 200 stories and articles, four volumes of poetry, and works for the stage. His first Professor Challenger work, The Lost World, published in 1912, gave its name to a subgenre of speculative fiction. He was also known for humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard. In 1902, King Edward VII knighted him in the Coronation Honours.

The cast of Doyle’s mind was shaped by medicine, travel, family strain, religion, and public argument. As a boy, he was educated by Jesuits at Hodder Place and Stonyhurst College, later saying the system was harsh and short on compassion and warmth. A year at Stella Matutina in Austria helped him perfect his German and broaden his studies. Raised Catholic, he became agnostic as a young adult and later a spiritualist mystic after family tragedies. His time at sea helped inspire “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” which popularised the mystery of the Mary Celeste.

Doyle also carried his concern for evidence into public life. He was politically active, twice stood unsuccessfully for Parliament, and wrote in support of compulsory vaccination, British causes in the Second Boer War and First World War, and reform of the Congo Free State. He personally investigated two closed cases, both leading to the exoneration of the accused men and helping set precedent that partly led to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. At the same time, he publicly supported psychics, telepathy, mentalism, spirit photography, and the Cottingley Fairies, later shown to be a hoax, which caused a public break with his friend Harry Houdini.

Doyle’s work remains widely read and adapted in the 21st century. Sherlock Holmes is recognised as the single most portrayed literary character in film and television history, and many fictional works have depicted or drawn on Doyle’s life. Readers still return to him because his best-known stories join sharp observation, suspense, friendship, and a belief that hidden facts can be brought into the open.