Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born at Picardy Place in Edinburgh on May 22, 1859, son of Charles Altamount Doyle and Mary (Foley) Doyle, and one of seven children who survived to adulthood. The Doyles were an artistic family, the most successful being Arthur’s uncle ‘Dickie’ Doyle, the noted illustrator for Punch, but his father suffered from alcoholism and later epilepsy, and was eventually committed to a mental hospital. Conan Doyle maintained a distant relationship with him, but it was his mother, whom he affectionately referred to as ‘the Ma’am’, who encouraged his love of literature, and he remained close to her throughout his life. The young Arthur was educated at the northern Jesuit school Stonyhurst, going on to study medicine at Edinburgh and was an enthusiastic reader and storyteller from a young age, as well as being an active sportsman. 

Conan Doyle incurred the wrath of his rich relations when he announced he was an agnostic. Rejecting their strict Catholicism and, cut off from their patronage, he decided to set up his own practice in Southsea in 1882. There he met his first wife, Louise Hawkins or ‘Touie’ and the couple were married in 1885, later having two children, a son and daughter. But in 1897 Conan Doyle met and instantly fell in love with Jean Leckie. They maintained a platonic relationship for ten years and Conan Doyle struggled with his feelings of guilt and deep affection for his wife and his passion for Jean. When in 1906 Touie died of consumption, Conan Doyle genuinely mourned her. He finally married Jean in 1907 and they had two sons and a daughter, living very happily together on their estate in Sussex, Windlesham, until Conan Doyle’s death in 1930.

It was in the year after his first marriage that Conan Doyle began toying with a character called Sherrinford Holmes. This was to become the first Sherlock Holmes story, his ‘shilling shocker’, A Study In Scarlet, published in 1887. And so the celebrated detective was born, with the faithful Dr Watson at his side. Conan Doyle consistently gave credit for the character to Dr Joseph Bell, an old tutor of his from Edinburgh University whose precision and powers of deduction Conan Doyle greatly admired. On the origins of the name, he commented that ‘I made thirty runs [at cricket] against a bowler by the name of Sherlock, and I always had a kindly feeling for the name’.

But it was in the new, popular literary magazine The Strand that the phenomenon of Sherlock Holmes really took off, with ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ appearing in 1891. It was an instant hit. Sidney Paget created the distinctive illustrations of Holmes, based on his younger brother Walter, depicted in a deerstalker (the pipe would come later). This iconic image became etched in the public’s mind and was more glamorous than Conan Doyle had envisaged; ‘the handsome Walter took the place of the more powerful, but uglier, Sherlock, and perhaps from the point of view of my lady readers it was as well.’

By this time Conan Doyle had given up practicing medicine entirely to write. He yearned to concentrate on his historical novels and, despite his success, saw Holmes as ‘taking his mind from better things’. So, after only two years, in 1893 he decided to kill him off in ‘The Final Problem’, where Holmes famously met his end alongside his nemesis Professor Moriarty. The public outcry was instant: women wept, men donned black armbands and subscriptions to The Strand plummeted by over 20,000, yet Conan Doyle was unmoved: ‘I feel towards him as I do toward paté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day’. It wasn’t until 1901 that Holmes reappeared in The Hound of the Baskervilles (a story that predated his death) and, with the public clambering for more, Doyle finally brought him back to life in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’(1903). By the beginning of the twentieth century the fan base for Sherlock Holmes was massive and far-reaching, from a Boston cabby in America to Abdul Hamid II, the then Sultan of Turkey, and has continued growing to this day. There have been countless stage productions and films, with Holmes defined by such actors as Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett and Michael Caine. And the stories weren’t merely entertainment; the investigative methods Conan Doyle used are said to have had a huge influence on police processes at the time.

Although Arthur Conan Doyle’s name will always be synonymous with Sherlock Holmes, his volume of works was huge and wide ranging, including historical fiction such as Micah Clarke and The White Company, histories of the Boer War and World War One, as well as the Professor Challenger stories, The Lost World (seen as the inspiration for Michael Crichton’s hugely popular Jurassic Park) and The Poison Belt. Conan Doyle’s fascination with spiritualism very much governed his outlook later on in life and he wrote The Coming of the Fairies in response to the case of the Cottingley fairies. Many fans found it hard to associate the creator of a detective so wedded to cool logic and fact with this ardent champion of the supernatural, but he never swayed in his beliefs.