Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a British writer and physician of Irish descent. He is best remembered for creating Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective who helped shape the modern crime story. He lived through the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and his work matters both for its mysteries and for the way it joined a fascination with science to popular storytelling.

He was born in Edinburgh into an Irish Catholic family with a tradition of illustrators and caricaturists. His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, struggled with alcoholism that scattered the family in 1864, while his mother, Mary Foley, encouraged his love of reading and storytelling. He was educated at the Jesuit school of Stonyhurst and later at Feldkirch in Austria, before enrolling in medicine at the University of Edinburgh. There he met the surgeon Joseph Bell, whose habit of close observation and deduction is often cited as a model for Holmes.

While still a student he wrote his first stories, and the first one appeared in print in 1879. After qualifying, he served as a ship's doctor on a whaler bound for the Arctic and on a steamer sailing to the west coast of Africa. In 1882 he settled in Portsmouth, where his medical practice attracted few patients, and the spare hours gave him time to write.

In 1887 he published A Study in Scarlet, the first appearance of Holmes. From 1891 his stories ran in The Strand Magazine, which brought him fame and a substantial income. His feelings about the character were mixed. In 1893 he had Holmes killed off in "The Final Problem", but the outcry from readers pushed him to bring the detective back years later in "The Empty House". Among his best-known books is also The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901).

His output was remarkably broad. He wrote historical fiction, including The Great Boer War (1900), comic stories about Brigadier Gerard, a soldier of the Napoleonic era, as well as plays and poetry. In science fiction he created Professor Challenger, the hero of The Lost World (1912), a book that gave its name to a whole subgenre. He was also active in public life: he was knighted in 1902 and twice stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. He supported compulsory vaccination and personally took up two criminal cases whose accused men were eventually cleared.

After the death of his first wife, Louisa Hawkins, in 1906, he married Jean Leckie. His spiritualist beliefs deepened after family tragedies, and he publicly backed the Cottingley Fairies, photographs later shown to be a hoax. That affair led to a public quarrel with the magician Harry Houdini. His legacy lies in the rational detective and in the puzzle solved through observation, conventions still central to crime fiction. Holmes is, by most accounts, the fictional character most often portrayed in film and television.