SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Arthur Conan Doyle had many careers—physician,
writer of popular fiction and nonfiction, war correspondent,
historian, and spiritualist—but it was the creation of the cultural
icon Sherlock Holmes that was to be his enduring legacy. The author
was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 22, 1859. His mother raised
ten children on her husband’s small income; his father’s poor
health and heavy drinking made that a daunting task. Despite this
adversity, his mother’s willfulness and her exhaustive genealogical
research instilled in Arthur a decided sense of purpose.
After early education in Jesuit schools, Conan
Doyle enrolled in Edinburgh University, where he earned a medical
degree while working part-time to support his family. At the
university one of his instructors was Dr. Joseph Bell, who had an
uncanny ability to deduce the histories of his patients and who
later became a template for Sherlock Holmes. Another teacher, an
eccentric Professor Rutherford, inspired the character of Professor
George Edward Challenger in The Lost World and two other
novels.
Having had a taste of adventure on a trip to
Greenland while still a student, Conan Doyle longed to travel after
graduation and so took a position as doctor on a ship en route to
West Africa. Returning to England, he set up as a physician in
1882. His practice was small at first, so he had time to do some
writing. In 1887 the first Sherlock Holmes story appeared, titled
A Study in Scarlet. Over the next few years, Conan Doyle
would write a historical novel, open a new ocular practice, explore
spiritualism, and send Holmes on further thrilling exploits. A
second novel, The Sign of Four, came out in 1890, and
starting in 1891 the Holmes stories regularly appeared in the
Strand Magazine. Two collections, The Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes in 1892 and The Memoirs of Sherlock
Holmes in 1893, collected a total of twenty-four of the
mysteries. However, Conan Doyle felt that work on the Holmes
stories was keeping him from writing on more serious historical
topics. To the shock of his readers, in the 1893 story called “The
Final Problem” he described the death of his famous sleuth.
In 1894 Conan Doyle published Round the Red
Lamp, a collection of short stories with a medical theme; in
1895 The Stark Munro Letters, an autobiographical novel; and
in 1896 The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, set in the
Napoleonic Wars. In 1900 he traveled to South Africa in the
capacity of war-time physician in Cape Town; his treatise on the
Boer War, a defense of Britain’s tactics, earned him a knighthood
in 1902. That same year Conan Doyle published The Hound of the
Baskervilles, set before the story that had finished Holmes off
in 1893. In 1903 new Holmes stories started to appear in the
Strand.
In the coming years, Conan Doyle produced more
popular books on a variety of subjects, including three new
collections of stories—The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905),
His Last Bow (1917), and The Case Book of Sherlock
Holmes (1927)—plus a final Holmes novel, The Valley of
Fear (1915). Among many other non-Holmes projects were the three
Challenger novels, historical fiction and nonfiction, and several
books on spiritualism. He also championed the rights of the wrongly
accused, in two separate cases exonerating innocent men.
With the onset of World War I, Conan Doyle served
as a war correspondent on several major European battlefields.
Following the war, he became a passionate advocate of spiritualism,
which he embraced in part to communicate with his eldest son,
Kingsley, who had died from influenza aggravated by war wounds.
From 1920 until his death, the author wrote, traveled, and lectured
to promote his belief in a spiritual life after the death of the
body. After a long, demanding journey through Scandi navia, Arthur
Conan Doyle suffered a heart attack; he died a few months later, on
July 7, 1930, in Sussex.