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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 in Edinburgh to Irish
parents who had emigrated to Scotland. He was 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 who was modeled after Doyle's former
University professor, Joseph Bell. Interestingly, Rudyard Kipling
congratulated Doyle in his success asking, "Could this be my old friend,
Dr. Joe?" Whilst living in Southsea he helped form Portsmouth Football
Club and played as the club's first ever goalkeeper.
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 her out of loyalty
to his first wife until her death. 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 in order to dedicate more of his time to more "important" works
(namely his historical novels), pitting Holmes against his arch-nemesis
Professor Moriarty. They apparently plunged to their deaths together
down 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", with the ingenious explanation that only
Moriarty had fallen, but, since Holmes had other dangerous enemies, he
had arranged to be temporarily "dead" also. Holmes eventually appears in
a total of 56 short stories and four Doyle 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 justifying
Britain's role in the Boer war. 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, led by the journalist
E. D. Morel and the diplomat Roger Casement. He wrote The Crime of the
Congo in 1909, a long pamphlet in which he denounced the horrors in
Congo. He become acquainted with Morel and Casement, taking inspiration
from them for two of the main characters 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 been driven mad and was not responsible of
his act.
Doyle was also a fervent advocate of
justice, personally investigating two closed cases. 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. Both men were eventually
released, in large part due to Doyle's efforts.
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
period of his life 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. However, later this ban was
cancelled.
Doyle was friends for a time with the
American magician Harry Houdini, a prominent opponent of the
Spiritualist movement. Although Houdini insisted that Spiritualist
mediums employed trickery (and consistently attempted to expose them as
frauds), Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed
supernatural powers, a view expressed in Doyle's The Edge of the
Unknown. Houdini was apparently unable to convince Doyle that the
former's feats were simply magic tricks, leading to a bitter, public
falling out between the two.
Richard Milner, a U.S. historian of
science, has presented a case that Doyle may have been the perpetrator
of the Piltdown man hoax of 1912, creating the counterfeit hominid
fossil that fooled the scientific world for over 40 years. Milner says
that Doyle had a motive (revenge on the scientific establishment for
debunking one of his favourite psychics) and that The Lost World
contains several encrypted clues regarding his involvement in the hoax.
Samuel Rosenberg's 1974 book Naked is the
Best Disguise purports to explain how Doyle left, throughout his
writings, open clues that related to hidden and suppressed aspects of
his mentality.
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. There is also
a statue of Sherlock Holmes in Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland -
close to the house where Conan Doyle was born.
Selected bibliography
Sherlock Holmes Stories
A Study in Scarlet (1887)
The Sign of Four (1890)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904)
The Valley of Fear (1914)
His Last Bow (1917)
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)
Professor Challenger Stories
The Lost World (1912)
The Poison Belt (1913)
The Land of Mists (1926)
The Disintegration Machine (1927)
When the World Screamed (1928)
Historical novels
The White Company (1891)
Micah Clarke (1888)
The Great Shadow (1892)
The Refugees (publ. 1893, written 1892)
Uncle Bernac (1897)
Sir Nigel (1906)
Other works
J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement (1883), a
story about the fate of the ship Mary Celeste
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 Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1903)
Through the Magic Door (1907)
The Crime of the Congo (1909)
The New Revelation (1918)
The Vital Message (1919)
Tales of Terror & Mystery (1923)
The History of Spiritualism (1926)
****
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