Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). Best known as the creator of the brilliant amateur sleuth Sherlock Holmes and his side-kick Dr Watson. Conan Doyle’s stories, with their ingenious plots and wonderful sense of late-Victorian England, are still being read all over the world. Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859. the son of a civil servant, he was educated at Stony Hurst School and then spent a year in Austria, before taking a degree in medicine at Edinburgh University. He later drew on the method of diagnosis used by one of his professors for the basis for Sherlock Holmes’s own deductive methods and ‘elementary’ approach to solving mysteries. Conan Doyle graduated in 1885 and set up as a doctor in Southsea. In order to supplement his income and fill in the quiet moments at work, he started to write detective stories. A Study in Scarlet which appeared in 1887, introduced the hawk-eyed detective, Sherlock Holmes, whose popular appearances in stories such as the Sign of Four made both himself and his creator household names. Many stories such as ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘A Case of Identity’, ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’ and ‘The Copper Beeches’ were first published in the Strand magazine and then in 1892 were collected as the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. A further selection of stories were collected in the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). Conan Doyle’s other novels and stories were often overshadowed by his most famous creation and in December 1893 he killed off Holmes (together with the arch-criminal Professor Moriarty) in a drama set... See more
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). Best known as the creator of the brilliant amateur sleuth Sherlock Holmes and his side-kick Dr Watson. Conan Doyle’s stories, with their ingenious plots and wonderful sense of late-Victorian England, are still being read all over the world. Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859. the son of a civil servant, he was educated at Stony Hurst School and then spent a year in Austria, before taking a degree in medicine at Edinburgh University. He later drew on the method of diagnosis used by one of his professors for the basis for Sherlock Holmes’s own deductive methods and ‘elementary’ approach to solving mysteries. Conan Doyle graduated in 1885 and set up as a doctor in Southsea. In order to supplement his income and fill in the quiet moments at work, he started to write detective stories. A Study in Scarlet which appeared in 1887, introduced the hawk-eyed detective, Sherlock Holmes, whose popular appearances in stories such as the Sign of Four made both himself and his creator household names. Many stories such as ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘A Case of Identity’, ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’ and ‘The Copper Beeches’ were first published in the Strand magazine and then in 1892 were collected as the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. A further selection of stories were collected in the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). Conan Doyle’s other novels and stories were often overshadowed by his most famous creation and in December 1893 he killed off Holmes (together with the arch-criminal Professor Moriarty) in a drama set in Austria. Holmes was later resurrected in the Return of Sherlock Holmes, when Conan Doyle succumbed to public pressure and revealed that the sleuth had been able to cheat death after all. Further collections of stories were published as His Last Bow and the Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. With his growing success as an author, Conan Doyle was able to give up his practice and concentrate on many other things. He was a passionate advocate of various diverse causes, from divorce law reform and the Channel Tunnel to the issuing of steel helmets to soldiers and inflatable life jackets to sailors. He was also a great campaigner on behalf of individuals wrongly imprisoned and his work on the Edalji case was instrumental in the introduction of the Court of Criminal Appeal. He was knighted in 1902 for his defence of British policy in the South African war. After the death of his son, as a result of a wound in the First World War, Conan Doyle became a spiritualist and his later work, such as the Wanderings, became heavily concerned with this subject. He died in 1930.
