Sir Arthur Conan Doyle(1859–1930)

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born at 11 Picardy Place in Edinburgh on the twenty-second of May 1859, son of Charles Altamont Doyle, a Civil Service architectural draftsman of the Irish Doyle line of Dublin Catholic gentry, and Mary Foley of Waterford. The Doyle family had emigrated to Edinburgh from Dublin in the 1830s; Charles's elder brother Richard was the great Punch illustrator of the 1840s and 1850s, and his uncle Henry Doyle was Director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Arthur was schooled by the Jesuits at Hodder, then at Stonyhurst in Lancashire, and at the University of Edinburgh Medical School from 1876 to 1881, where his teacher in clinical surgery was Joseph Bell, the lean, hawk-faced consulting surgeon at the Royal Infirmary whose method of deducing a patient's life-history from purely visual observation became the diagnostic model for the character Conan Doyle would invent six years later.

He took his MB in 1881 and his MD in 1885, served as ship's surgeon on the Greenland whaler Hope (1880) and the West Africa steamer Mayumba (1881 to 1882), and set up a general practice at Bush Villa, Elm Grove, Southsea, in 1882. The practice was slow. To fill the long empty afternoons he wrote. A Study in Scarlet, the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, was completed at Southsea in April 1886, sold for twenty-five pounds outright to Ward Lock and Company, and published in the Beeton's Christmas Annual of 1887. The Sign of the Four followed in Lippincott's Magazine in February 1890, and the first cycle of twelve short Holmes stories ran in the Strand Magazine from July 1891 to June 1892 under the collective title The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The Strand series, illustrated by Sidney Paget, was the publishing event of the early 1890s English popular magazine market. The Strand circulation rose from a hundred thousand a month before Holmes to half a million within a year. Conan Doyle was paid thirty-five pounds for the first story and a thousand pounds for the third Strand series in 1903, the highest rate paid to any working short-story writer in the English language at the time. The full Holmes canon eventually ran to four novels (A Study in Scarlet, 1887; The Sign of the Four, 1890; The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902; The Valley of Fear, 1915) and fifty-six short stories collected in five volumes, and laid down for every subsequent detective in the English language the central architectural conventions of the genre: the eccentric consulting detective, the steady professional narrator, the chambers in Baker Street, the deduction by visual observation, the ratiocination scene before the assembled suspects, the disclosed Lestrade-of-the-Yard policeman as the foil.

He produced beside the Holmes work an output across most of the literary forms of his generation. He wrote the historical novels Micah Clarke (1889) and The White Company (1891), the Brigadier Gerard Napoleonic short stories, the foundational scientific-romance novel The Lost World (1912) that introduced the modern dinosaur-on-the-plateau plot, the Brigadier Etienne Gerard cycle of fifty French-army comedy stories that ran in the Strand alongside Holmes, the medieval romance Sir Nigel (1906), and the long campaign-history The Great Boer War (1900) for which he served as physician with the Langman Field Hospital at Bloemfontein, and the resulting Conduct of the War in South Africa pamphlet (1902), the work that earned him his knighthood from Edward the Seventh in 1902.

He died at his house at Crowborough in Sussex on the seventh of July 1930 in his seventy-second year. The four novels and fifty-six short stories of the Holmes canon have been continuously in print since 1887 in every major language. The Guinness Book of World Records lists Holmes as the single most-portrayed human character in the history of film and television, with over two hundred and fifty distinct screen actors having taken the role across more than three hundred films and television productions. The Doyle name in modern English-language popular fiction carries the weight of the Southsea general practitioner whose afternoon work in the empty consulting room of 1886 produced the most-read literary character of the modern world.