Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (May 22, 1859 – July 7, 1930) is the
British author most famously known for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction. He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction.
He is sometimes called Conan Doyle—Conan was originally a middle
name but he used it as part of his surname in his later years.
Life
He was born in 1859 (Edinburgh) and sent to the Jesuit preparatory school Stonyhurst at the age
of nine, and by the time he left the school in 1875 he rejected Christianity to become an agnostic. From 1876 to 1881 he
studied medicine at Edinburgh University, including a
period working in the town of Aston (now a district of Birmingham). Following his term at University he served as a ship's doctor on a voyage to the West African coast, and then in 1882 he set up a practice in
Plymouth. He won his doctorate in 1885. His medical practice was unsuccessful;
while waiting for patients he began writing stories. His first literary experience came in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal
before he was 20.
It was only after he subsequently moved his practice to Southsea that he began
to indulge more extensively in literature. His first significant work was A Study in Scarlet which appeared in Beeton's
Christmas Annual for 1887 and featured the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes.
In 1885 he married Louise Hawkins, who suffered from tuberculosis and eventually died in 1906. He married Miss Jean Leckie in
1907, whom he had first met and fallen in love with in 1897 but had maintained a platonic relationship with out of
loyalty to his first wife. Doyle had five children, two with his first wife (Mary and Kingsley), and three with his second wife
(Jean, Denis, and Adrian).
In 1890 Doyle studied the eye in Vienna, and
in 1891 moved to London to set up a practice as
an oculist. This also gave him more time for writing, and in November 1891 he wrote to his mother: "I think of slaying Holmes...
and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things." In December 1893
he did so, with Holmes and his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty
apparently plunging to their deaths together over a waterfall in the story "The Final Problem". Public outcry led him to bring
the character back—Doyle returned to the story in "The Adventure of the Empty House", saying that only Moriarty had fallen,
but, since Holmes had other dangerous enemies, he had arranged to be temporarily "dead" also. Holmes eventually appeared in 56
short stories and four of Doyle's novels (he has since appeared in many
novels and stories by other authors, as well).
Following the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the century and the condemnation from around the world over Britain's conduct,
Doyle wrote a short pamphlet titled The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct which was widely translated. Doyle
believed that it was this pamphlet that resulted in his being knighted and appointed as Deputy-Lieutenant of Surrey in 1902. He also wrote the longer book The
Great Boer War in 1900. During the early years of the twentieth century Sir Arthur
twice ran for Parliament as a Liberal Unionist, once in
Edinburgh and once in the Border Burghs, but although he received a respectable vote he was not elected. He did, however, become
one of the first Honorary Members of the Ski Club of
Great Britain.
Conan Doyle was involved even in the campaign for the reform of the Congo Free State, lead by the journalist Edmund Dene Morel and the diplomat Roger
Casement. He wrote The Crime of the Congo in 1908, a long pamphlet in which he
denounced the horrors in Congo. He become acquainted with Morel and Casement, taking even inspiration by them for two of the main
character of the novel The
Lost World (1912). He broke with both, however, with the first world
war, when Morel (who was rather left-wing) became one of the leaders of the pacifist movement and Casement betrayed England
for his Irish nationalistic views. He, however, tried to save Casement from death
penalty, arguing that he had driven mad and was not responsible of his act.
Doyle also caused two cases to be reopened. The first case, in 1906, involved a shy half-British, half-Indian lawyer named
George Edalji, who had allegedly penned threatening letters and mutilated animals. Police were dead set on Edalji's guilt, even
though the mutilations continued even after their suspect was jailed. It was partially as a result of this case that the Court of
Criminal Appeal was established in 1907, so not only did Conan Doyle help George Edalji, his work helped to establish a way to
correct other miscarriages of justice. The second
case—that of Oscar Slater, a German Jew and gambling-den operator convicted of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman in
1908—excited Doyle's curiosity because of inconsistencies in the prosecution case and a general sense that Slater was
framed. It is not known whether either enjoyed the same resolution as Holmes' clients.
In his later years, Doyle became involved with Spiritualism, to the
extent that he wrote a Professor Challenger novel on the
subject, The Land of Mist. One of the odder aspects of this involvement was his book The Coming of the Fairies
(1921): He was apparently totally convinced of the veracity of the Cottingley fairy photographs, which he reproduced in the book, together with theories about the nature
and existence of fairies and spirits. His work on this topic was one of the reasons that one of his short story collections,
The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes, was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929 under the pretense of occultism.
Arthur Conan Doyle is buried in the Church Yard at Minstead in the New Forest, Hampshire, England.
A statue has been erected in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's honour. It may be seen at Crowborough Cross in Crowborough, East Sussex,
England, where Sir Arthur lived for 23 years.
Selected bibliography
Historical novels
- The White Company
(1891)
- Micah Clarke (1888)
- The Great Shadow
(1892)
- The Refugees (publ. 1893,
written 1892)
- The Great Shadow
(1892)
- Uncle Bernac (1897)
- Sir Nigel (1906)
Other works
- Mystery of
Cloomber (1889)
- The Captain of the Polestar, and other tales (1890)
- The
Doings Of Raffles Haw (1891)
- Beyond the City
(1892)
- Round The Red Lamp
(1894)
- The Parasite (1894)
- The Stark
Munro Letters (1895)
- Rodney Stone (1896)
- Songs of Action
(1898)
- The
Tragedy of The Korosko (1898)
- A Duet (1899)
- The Great Boer War
(1900)
- The
Adventures of Gerard (1903)
- Through the
Magic Door (1907)
- The Crime of
the Congo (1908)
- The New Revelation
(1918)
- The Vital Message
(1919)
- Tales of Terror & Mystery (1923)
- The
History of Spiritualism (1926)
External links
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