Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859–1930)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's unforgettable creations— Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and their adventures— continue to shape detective fiction more than a century after they first appeared.

Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland, into a family descended on both sides from painters, cartoonists, and illustrators. Educated at Stonyhurst College in England, Doyle prepared for a career in medicine at Edinburgh University. One of his professors, Dr. Joseph Bell, had an uncanny ability to deduce the occupations of his patients from their physical appearance. Bell became the model for Sherlock Holmes.

Doyle received his medical degree in 1885 and his first medical posts were as a ship's surgeon on voyages to the Arctic and to the west coast of Africa. He then set up a medical practice in the small city of Portsmouth in England, where he remained for eight years.

When his medical practice failed to produce enough money, Doyle turned to writing. Later in his career, he recalled that he was disappointed in the detective fiction he read for entertainment, since the solution to the mystery nearly always depended on chance. Doyle decided that he would try to " reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science." With the publication of A Study in Scarlet in 1887, Sherlock Holmes was born.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson quickly caught the public's imagination and brought fame to their creator. In the same year that A Study in Scarlet was published, Doyle started work on a historical novel, Micah Clarke, set in 17th century England. Publication of a series of Sherlock Holmes tales in an illustrated monthly magazine called the Strand brought Doyle a handsome income, and soon after his move to London in 1891 he abandoned his medical practice to become a full-time writer.

Ironically, however, Doyle soon grew tired of writing the Holmes stories. By 1893, he had written and published two more historical novels, and he felt that this type of writing was far more serious and important than detective fiction. In 1893, in a story entitled "The Final Problem," Doyle killed his most famous creation by having Holmes and the detective's arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty, fall off a cliff. Readers were furious. Twenty thousand subscribers to the Strand canceled their subscriptions, and one reader denounced Doyle in a letter as "You brute!"

Although Doyle had stopped writing about Sherlock Holmes, he continued to write prolifically, producing stories, novels, and plays. In 1900, he served as a physician in South Africa during the Boer War. When he returned to England, he compiled a history of the conflict and defended the actions of the British in a lengthy pamphlet. In 1902, he received a knighthood from King Edward VII.

Around this time, Doyle brought his famous detective back to life after an absence of ten years. Legions of Holmes fans were ecstatic. It was then that he wrote one of his most famous Holmes tales, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). More stories followed, and the demand for them was so great that by the 1920s Doyle was the most highly-paid writer in the world.

Doyle's personal life brought him a mixture of happiness and misfortune. Following his wife's death in 1906, he remarried in 1907. However, the death of his brother and oldest son in World War I dealt him a grievous blow. Despite heart disease, Doyle continued to work until his death in July 1930 in Crowborough, Sussex, England.

In a detective story (sometimes called a "whodunit"), a crime is committed by one of a group of suspects, and an expert detective solves the puzzle of the criminal's identity. The American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story. Poe probably based his character C. Auguste Dupin, the detective in three of his best-known stories, on the memoirs of a French detective named Eugène-François Vidocq.

Many features found in detective fiction today may be traced back to Poe, including the super-intelligent detective, the police who are stumped by the crime, and the detective's friend who serves as the narrator. All these characteristics are prominent in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Detective fiction is an extremely popular, international literary genre. One measure of Sherlock Holmes's popularity is the large number of film and television adaptations of Doyle's stories about the detective.

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