Authors

Arthur Conan Doyle

Scottish 1859 - 1930

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, writer and creator of Sherlock Holmes, the most famous fictional detective of all time, was born at 11 Picardy Place in Edinburgh on the 22 May 1859.

He was of Irish Catholic descent on both sides; his English born father Charles Altamont Doyle was an artist, draughtman and civil servant, and his mother Mary, nee Foley, was an Irish Immigrant. Her mother took in paying guests and the couple met when Charles moved in. They married in 1855 and had ten children together. In later life Arthur would write of his mother's gift for storytelling and her influence over his young mind,

"In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories she would tell me would stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life."

In 1864, Charles's growing problem with alcohol led the family to separate. Arthur was sent to live with the sister of John Hill Burton, Historiographer Royal for Scotland, the man who would play an instrumental role in the young boy's developing love of books and history. The Doyle family reunited in 1867, moving to a run-down tenement at 3 Sciennes Place in Edinburgh. Outgoing and adventurous, Arthur led a gang of local boys, later fictionalised as 'The Baker Street Irregulars' of his Sherlock Holmes stories.

Although Charles's drinking meant that the family were reduced to a state of poverty, wider family wealth afforded Arthur the opportunity of a good education and he was sent to board at Hodder preparatory school followed by Stonyhurst College, a prestigious Jesuit public school in Lancashire. Schooldays were a mixed experience for Arthur; he was often homesick but he was good at sports and, like his mother, he excelled at storytelling, entertaining his schoolmates by drawing on his love of the stories of Walter Scott and the father of detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe.

He was also much affected by the beauty and atmosphere of the Ribble Valley and would later recreate it in his work, albeit transposed onto other locations, like mist bound Dartmoor in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901). Arthur spent his last year of schooling in Feldkirch, Austria, an experience which widened his outlook and allowed him to look at the world from a non-exclusively British perspective.

Arthur Conan Doyle entered the University of Edinburgh medical school in 1876, although a shortage of funds meant that his studies were interspersed with periods working as a doctor's assistant in Birmingham. His mentor at university was Dr Joseph Bell, the brilliant surgeon and pioneer of forensic medicine whose analytic powers of deduction had earned him a formidable reputation among his peers and students. Alongside Poe's fictional Monsieur Dupin, he was the foremost inspiration for the character of Sherlock Holmes, as Doyle openly acknowledged in a letter to his former teacher,

"...round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man".

Robert Louis Stevenson would later recognise this, writing to Doyle from his home in Samoa: 'My compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes...can this be my old friend Joe Bell?' In contrast to the austere and scientific Bell was another of Doyle's teachers, Sir Patrick Heron Watson, remembered for his warmth and humanity. When Doyle came later to portray their fictionalised counterparts, Holmes's rapid power of deduction set alongside Watson's slower, considered empiricism proved an irresistible combination and their brilliant, ironic and infectious dialogue would be a key to their enormous success.

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"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important."

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Early Inspiration

Before Sherlock Holmes appeared in print, Doyle was already a prolific story writer. His first published work of fiction, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley, set in South Africa, appeared in Chamber's Edinburgh Journal in September 1879, the same month as his first academic article Gelsemium as a Poison's appearance in The British Medical Journal. On graduating, Doyle's foremost ambitions still lay in the practice of medicine and his adventurous streak, which already had led him to spend seven months as a surgeon on a whaling ship in the Arctic, surfaced again in 1881 when he set sail as a doctor on a passenger ship bound for West Africa. Here he was called upon to treat the dying African-American anti-slavery leader Henry Highland Garnet whose cause and beliefs won Doyle's life-long support.

On his return, Doyle eventually settled in Southsea, Hampshire, setting up a medical practice and, in 1885, marrying Louisa Hawkins. A shortage of regular patients led him back to writing fiction to supplement his income. Seafaring had proved an inspiration and The Captain of the Pole-Star and J.Habakuk Jephson's Statement, based around the mystery of the 'Mary Celeste', were two of the most successful stories, the later narrated by a vengeful ex-slave, an idea derived from Garnet's passionate account of suffering under slavery.

The Rise of Sherlock Holmes

Doyle's fiction was making great progress; Guy de Maupassant proved a useful model by demonstrating the economies of the short story, as did The Edinburgh Medical Journal with its logical progression from gathering information to analysis and conclusion. This would be especially helpful to the structural development of the Sherlock Holmes stories beginning with A Study in Scarlet, first published in November 1886.

Struggling to find a publisher for his new creation, Doyle had accepted a poor financial deal for all rights from Ward Lock & Co. The story reappeared the following year in Beaton's Christmas Annual of 1887, garnering high praise from the Scotsman and Herald newspapers. A sequel, The Sign of Four, was commissioned and serialised in Lippincott's Magazine in 1890.

With the intention of becoming an eye specialist Doyle moved his family to London, but this plan faltered; writing was now taking most of his time. Newly founded, The Strand Magazine had taken up Sherlock Holmes who first appeared in its pages in July 1891. The magazine's circulation soon doubled. Cocaine-using Holmes was both rebel and upholder of the law and as well as crime solving, the stories would often confront social wrongs, criticizing official incompetence and aristocratic privilege and even taking a thinly veiled aim at the unsavory exploits of Edward, Prince of Wales in A Scandal in Bohemia and The Beryl Coronet. So compelling was Sherlock Holmes that 221b Baker street would soon become London's most famous fictional address.

Doyle finally abandoned medicine in 1891. Although now earning him good money, Sherlock Holmes was so successful that it threatened to overshadow everything important to him, not least his other fiction. His solution was to attempt to kill off Holmes in a showdown with arch enemy Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem (1893). Such was the dramatic force of this conclusion that it only further fuelled public demand. Doyle, on the promise of a very large sum of money, eventually gave in and resurrected Holmes for the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles of 1901. Over the years, the Sherlock Holmes stories were collected and published as: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), The Last Bow (1917) and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1927).

Doyle would continue to write mysteries for Holmes to solve, but they would no longer be his main focus. Historic fiction was Doyle's first love. Fascinated by the Napoleonic era, he had produced A Straggler of 15, published in Black and White in 1891. This went on to great success when it was staged as Waterloo starring Henry Irving. Other historic novels include The White Company (1891) and Sir Nigel (1906). His Brigadier Gerard would replace Sherlock Holmes on the pages of The Strand Magazine. These stories, rich in military and social history, were collected as The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896) and The Adventures of Gerard (1903).

After Sherlock Holmes, Doyle's most famous creation is Professor Challenger from the novels The Lost World (1912) and The Poison Belt (1913). These books would move into the realm of science fiction, exploring the fascination and fear surrounding scientific discovery. But Doyle was also a gifted and persuasive writer of non-fiction. Always a keen political campaigner, a number of seemingly disparate causes won his support. Essentially a 'New Imperialist' politically, in 1900 he travelled to South Africa as a volunteer physician and war correspondent during the Second Boer War.

From this experience came two books: The Great Boer War (1900) and The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conclusion (1902). The latter, translated into many foreign languages, put forward the British case for the controversial war and it was for this public service that he was knighted in 1902.

Later Life

Arthur Conan Doyle's first wife Louisa died of Tuberculosis in 1906 and he married Jean Leckie soon after. Doyle had lost his belief in Catholic doctrine while still a pupil at Stonyhurst. In later life he would be increasingly drawn to Spiritualism and he wrote a number of books on the subject for which he hoped to be remembered. The tragic loss of his son Kingsley from war wounds and influenza in 1918 intensified a now pervasive preoccupation with death and a hope in the possibility of an afterlife. The creator of the scientific skeptic Sherlock Holmes was turning his back on the scientific skepticism experienced in his years as a medical student. He now perceived in it and rejected an element of professional callousness.

Doyle would nobly take up the causes of the subjects of grave miscarriages of justice. In 1920, rather touchingly, he threw enthusiastic support behind the two young girls responsible for the Cottingley fairy pictures hoax, wholeheartedly believing in their authenticity. By way of response, he wrote The Coming of the Fairies in 1922.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Scotsman who created the stories that would come to define late Victorian London in popular culture died at Windlesham Manor, his home in Crowborough, Sussex on the 7 July 1930. His last book, entitled The Edge of the Unknown, was published that same year.