Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh into an Irish-Catholic family that was both artistically gifted and chronically unstable. His father was an alcoholic artist who eventually had to be institutionalized. His mother, by all accounts, was the steady center of his early life and the source of his interest in storytelling. Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where one of his professors, Dr. Joseph Bell, became the model for Sherlock Holmes. Bell could allegedly diagnose patients with a single glance, identify their occupations from their hands, and tell where they had been by mud on their shoes. Doyle never forgot it.He set up as a doctor in Portsmouth in 1882 and started writing fiction in the slow hours between patients. A Study in Scarlet appeared in 1887, the second Holmes novel in 1890, and from 1891 onward the Strand Magazine ran a Holmes short story almost every month. The success was overwhelming, and Doyle came to resent it. He thought of himself first as a writer of historical fiction, especially the Brigadier Gerard novels and the medieval romance The White Company. The public only wanted more Holmes. In 1893 he killed Holmes off at Reichenbach Falls. The public did not let him. He held out ten years, then brought Holmes back, then resented him all over again.The rest of his career was unusually wide-ranging. He wrote science fiction (The Lost World, which essentially invented the dinosaur-survival genre), historical novels, war propaganda, and a great deal of nonfiction. He campaigned hard for justice in real criminal cases, including the George Edalji affair, which helped lead to the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal. He volunteered as a medic in the Boer War. After his son's death in World War One he became increasingly involved in spiritualism and spent his last years lecturing on it across multiple continents. He died in 1930, by which point Holmes had long since outgrown him.