Arthur Conan Doyle

Life

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 to a family of Irish Catholic descent. His father, an artist and civil servant, was an alcoholic who spent his later years in institutions, and the family was supported by relatives. Doyle was educated at Jesuit schools in England and at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied medicine and encountered Joseph Bell, the surgeon whose diagnostic method he later gave to Sherlock Holmes. He served as a ship’s doctor on an Arctic whaler and on a voyage to West Africa before setting up a practice in Southsea, near Portsmouth, in 1882.

The practice was slow and he wrote to fill the time. A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes story, was published in 1887. The character became a phenomenon with the short stories that began appearing in The Strand Magazine in 1891, and Doyle gave up medicine. He grew tired of Holmes and killed him off in 1893, then brought him back a decade later under public and financial pressure.

Doyle regarded his historical novels as his real work, served as a volunteer doctor in the Boer War, was knighted in 1902, campaigned against the abuses in the Congo Free State and on behalf of men he believed wrongly convicted, and stood twice for Parliament without success. After the deaths of his son and brother around the end of the First World War he devoted himself to spiritualism, writing and lecturing on it worldwide. He died at his home in Sussex in 1930.

Literary significance

Doyle created the most famous character in detective fiction and, with him, most of the genre’s conventions: the brilliant consulting detective, the loyal narrator-companion, the baffled official police, the explanation delivered at the end. Edgar Allan Poe had done some of this earlier, but Doyle made it a formula that could be repeated, and the Holmes stories have been continuously in print, adapted and imitated since the 1890s.

He was also a prolific and capable writer outside the genre. The Lost World, about a plateau where dinosaurs survive, started a long line of imitators; his Napoleonic stories about Brigadier Gerard are still read; and his historical novels The White Company and Sir Nigel were once as popular as Holmes.

Where to start

A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes novel, is in this library, as are The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the first collection of short stories, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, the best of the Holmes novels. Most readers find the Adventures the best introduction.