Arthur Conan Doyle was born at Picardy Place, Edinburgh in 1859. His father was a civil servant. To supplement the family income, Doyle’s father painted, made illustrations for books and worked as a police sketch artist.
As a child Doyle was encouraged by his mother to explore the world of books. She was a woman with a dominant personality who had Doyle learn French so he could read Jules Verne in the original language. Due to financial problems, his mother kept a boarding house and may have had an affair with one of the boarders, Bryan Charles Waller, who was a student of pathology. Waller had a deep impact on Doyle.
Doyle was educated in Jesuit schools. During this time he lost his Roman Catholic faith, but the Jesuit training deeply affected him. Many of the characters of his Homes books were drawn from people from Stronghurst College, among them two boys named Moriarty.
Doyle went on to Edinburgh University to study medicine. He qualified as a doctor in 1885. The year before, he had married Louise Hawkins. They moved to Hampshire where he practiced as an eye specialist until 1891, when he quite to become a full-time writer.
He had been writing most of his life. His first story was an illustrated tale written about a man and a tiger when he was six. His first novel about Sherlock Homes, “A Study in Scarlet” was published in 1887 in “Beeton’s Christmas Annual” In it, he introduced all of his major characters including his sidekick, Dr. Watson, the evil genius, Dr. Moriarty, and the beautiful opera singer, Irene Adler.
His second Holmes’ story was “The Sign of the Four” and published in Lippencotts Magazine. As was usually the case, Doyle surrounded the story and mystery with a variety of highly interesting and unusual characters. The “Strand Magazine” started to publish “The Adventures of Sherlock Homes” in July of 1891 and Holmes’ fictional address, 221 B Baker Street, London, may well be the most famous address in British literature.
Doyle became “sick” of his character and “killed” him off in the “Final Problem” published in The Strand in 1893. His readers rebelled and the Strand’s subscription dropped dramatically. In 1902, Doyle published “The Hound of the Baskervilles” purportedly from an earlier case file of Holmes. In 1903, be brought Holmes back in “The Empty House”.
Sherlock Homes short stories were collected in five books. The first was “The Adventures of Sherlock Homes” in 1892. “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” came in 1894, followed by “The Return of Sherlock Homes (1904), “His Last Bow” in 1917, and “The Case-Book of Sherlock Homes” in 1927.
Doyle served for a few months as a physician at a field hospital during the South African war and served on expeditions to the arctic and West Africa as a ships surgeon. From the experience during the Boer War, he wrote “The War in South Africa” in which he defended England’s policy. Later he wrote a six volume set about the history of England in World War I, published in 1928. It was called “The British Campaign in France and Flanders”.
Doyle was knighted in 1902 and ran for parliament unsuccessfully in 1900 and 1906. His first wife Louise died in early 1906 and fourteen months later he married Jean Leckie. His son Kingsley died from wounds in World War I and Doyle’s long standing interest in spiritualistic matters intensified. Some of these themes predate the Holmes stories.
Doyle believed in the “little people” and wrote ‘The Coming of Fairies” in 1922. Prior to that, in 1920, he published an article favorable to the so-called “fairy photographs” which supposedly showed fairies dancing in the air. He also opened The Psychic Book Shop in 1925 and had Harry Houdini as a close friend. He believed that Houdini possessed supernatural powers, but Houdini denied this.
Doyle’s last book was published in 1930. It was called ‘The Edge of the Unknown” and recorded his own physic experiences. In one of these, he reported seeing a friend, D.D. Home, levitate and float “out of the bedroom and into the sitting room window, passing seventy feet above the street.” He died in his home in Windlesham, Sussex on July 5, 1930 from heart disease.
His other publications include plays, verse, short stories, memoirs, and a number of historical novels and supernatural and speculative fiction. He published “The Lost World” in 1912, featuring Professor George Edward Challenger, a novel that blended scientific fact with fantastic fiction. Doyle’s model for the professor was a teacher of his from Edinburgh.
The characteristic of using his own experience to frame his work and characters was repeated over and over in his work. He wrote many letters to the editor and was a crusader for social reforms. He visited the US and Canada and wrote about what he saw and felt about those different places.
He based Sherlock Holmes in part on Edgar Allen Poe’s character C. Auguste Depin, but more broadly on Joseph Bell, his teacher and mentor at the University of Edinburgh. Bell’s powers of observation and deduction were legendary, as were those of the fictional detective., Mr. Holmes.
