Arthur Conan Doyle

About this figure

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a Scottish physician and writer best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective whose methods of deduction from physical evidence made him one of the most enduring characters in English fiction. Trained as a doctor at the University of Edinburgh, Doyle based Holmes's forensic style of observation on one of his medical instructors, Dr. Joseph Bell, who could reportedly infer a patient's occupation and history from small physical details before they spoke. Doyle's medical practice attracted few patients in its early years, giving him time to write, and his first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887, introducing Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson.

The Holmes stories grew into an enormous and lucrative body of work across four novels and dozens of short stories, collected in volumes including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow, The Sign of the Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Valley of Fear. Doyle grew to resent the character's overwhelming popularity, feeling it overshadowed historical fiction he considered more serious work, and killed Holmes off in 1893 in a story that had him fall to his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls; public outcry was severe enough that Doyle eventually revived him nearly a decade later. He was knighted in 1902, primarily in recognition of a pamphlet he wrote defending British conduct in the Boer War rather than for his fiction.

Later in life, and particularly after the death of his son and other close relatives during and after the First World War, Doyle became a committed and very public advocate for Spiritualism, the belief that the dead could communicate with the living through mediums, publishing works including The New Revelation and The Vital Message setting out his conversion and his case for the movement's claims. This later career damaged his literary reputation among some contemporaries, especially after his public defense of mediums and spirit photography that other investigators, including his former friend Harry Houdini, considered fraudulent, though Doyle maintained his convictions sincerely and without evident financial motive until his death in 1930.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.