About The Author
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (1859-1930)
A British physician who turned to writing, Conan Doyle thought he would be remembered for his historical novels. His fame, however, rests on his creation of the master detective of fiction, the incomparable Sherlock Holmes.
Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 22, 1859. He was the oldest son of Charles Doyle, an artist. His parents were Irish Roman Catholics, and he received his early education in a Jesuit school, Stonyhurst. Later he got a medical degree at Edinburgh University. He started practice as a family physician in Southsea, England. His income was small, and he began writing stories to make ends meet. In 1891 he decided to give up medicine to concentrate on his writing.
Conan Doyle was knighted in 1902 for his pamphlet justifying England's part in the Boer War, in which he served at a field hospital. He was married twice. The death of his son Kingsley in World War I intensified his interest in psychic phenomena, and in later years he wrote and lectured on spiritualism. He died in Sussex on July 7,1930.
A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887, introduced Holmes and his friend Doctor John Watson. The second Holmes story was The Sign of Four (1890). In 1891 Doyle began a series for Strand magazine called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes has become known to movie and television audiences as a tall and lean, pipe-smoking, violin-playing detective. He lived at 221 Baker Street in London, where he was often visited by his friend Doctor John Watson, an associate in the many adventures. And according to Doyle, it was Watson who recorded the Holmes stories for posterity.
Conan Doyle said he modeled Holmes after one of his teachers in Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell could glance at a corpse on the anatomy table and deduce that the man had been a left-handed shoemaker. "It is all very well to say that a man is clever," Conan Doyle wrote, "but the reader wants to see examples of it--such examples as Bell gave us every day in the wards." The author eventually became bored with Holmes and "killed" him. Readers' protests made him change his mind, and the next story told how the detective had miraculously survived the death struggle on the edge of a precipice. Stories dealing with Holmes's exploits continued to appear almost to the end of Doyle's life.
--Courtesy of Compton's Learning Company
Back
