Arthur Conan Doyle was born at Picardy Place, Edinburgh, as the son of Charles Altamont Doyle, a civil servant in the Edinburgh Office of Works, and Mary (Foley) Doyle. Both of Doyle’s parents were Roman Catholics. To increase his income Charles Altamont painted, made book illustrations, and also worked as a sketch artist on criminal trials. Not long after arriving Edinburgh he started to drink, he suffered from epilepsy and was eventually institutionalized. Richard Doyle (1824-83), the uncle of A.C. Doyle and the son of the caricaturist John Doyle, was also an illustrator. He worked for Punch and illustrated chiefly fairy stories, including Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River, W. Allingham’s In Fairyland and some of Dickens’s Christmas Books.
Doyle’s mother, Mary had interest in literature, and she encouraged his son to explore the world of books. At the age of fourteen Doyle had learned French so that he could read Jules Verne in the author’s original language. Charles Altamot died in an asylum in 1893; in the same year Doyle decided to finish permanently the adventures of his master detective. Because of financial problems, Doyle’s mother kept a boarding house.
Doyle was educated in Jesuit schools. During this period Doyle lost his belief in the Roman Catholic faith, but the training of the Jesuits influenced deeply his thought. Later he used his friends and teachers from Stonyhurst College as models for his characters in the Holmes stories, among them two boys named Moriarty. Doyle studied at Edinburgh University and in 1884 he married Louise Hawkins.
Doyle qualified as doctor in 1885. After graduation Doyle practiced medicine as an eye specialist at Southsea near Portsmouth in Hampshire until 1891 when he became a full time writer. His first story, an illustrated tale of a man and a tiger, Doyle had produced at the age of six. Doyle’s first novel about Holmes, A Study In Scarlet, was published in 1887 in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. The story was written in three weeks in 1886.
The second Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of the Four, was written for a magazine. Doyle collected a colorful group of people together, among them Jonathan Small who has a wooden leg and a dwarf from Tonga islands. The Strand Magazine started to publish ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ from July 1891. Holmes’s address at Mrs. Hudson’s house, 221B Baker Street, London, is perhaps the most famous London street in literature.
Already at the end of 1891, Doyle planned to abandon the series. In 1893 Doyle devised his death in the ‘Final Problem,’ published in the Strand in the December issue. Holmes meets Moriarty at the fall of the Reichenbach in Switzerland and disappears. Watson finds a letter from Homes, stating “I have already explained to you, however, that my career had in any case reached its crisis, and that no possible conclusion to it could be more congenial to me than this.”
Doyle’s readers expressed their disappointment by wearing mourning bands and Strand lost 20,000 subscriptions. In The Hound Of Baskervilles (1902) Doyle narrated an early case of the dead detective. The ingenious murder weapon in the story is an animal. Because of public demand Doyle resurrected his popular character in ‘The Empty House’ (1903).
In these following stories Holmes stopped using cocaine. Although Doyle’s later works have been criticized, several of them, including ‘The Three Garridebs,’ ‘The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,’ and ‘The Veiled Lodger,’ are highly enjoyable. Sherlock Holmes short stories were collected in five books. The first appeared in 1892 under the title The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes. It was followed by The Memoirs Of Sherlock Holmes (1894), The Return Of Sherlock Holmes (1904), His Last Bow (1917), and The Case-Book Of Sherlock Holmes (1927).
During the South African war (1899-1902) Doyle served for a few months as senior physician at a field hospital, and wrote The War In South Africa, in which he defended England’s policy. The same uncritical attitude toward the British empire marked his history of World War-I, The British Campaign In France And Flanders, 1928 (6 vols.). Doyle was knighted in 1902 and in 1900 and 1906 he also ran unsuccessfully for Parliament. Fourteen months after his long-invalided wife Louisa died, Conan Doyle married in 1907 his second wife, Jean Leckie. When his son Kingsley died from wounds incurred in World War I, the author dedicated himself in spiritualistic studies. An example of these is The Coming Of Fairies (1922). But he had already showed interest in occult fantasy before publishing Holmes stories. In his early novel, The Mystery Of Cloomber (1888), a retired general finds himself under assault by Indian magic.
Doyle supported the existence of “little people” and spent more than a million dollars on their cause. The so-called “fairy photographs” caused an international sensation when Doyle published a favourable account of them in 1920. The photographs showed fairies dancing in the air. Doyle became president of several important spiritualist organizations. In 1925 he opened the Psychic Bookshop in London. Among his friends was the legendary American magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (1874-1926). He believed that Houdini possessed supernatural powers, which the magician himself denied. His own psychic experiences Doyle recorded in The Edge Of Unknown (1930), which was his last book. Doyle died on July 7, 1930 from heart disease at his home in Sussex.
Conan Doyle’s other publications include plays, verse, memoirs, short stories, and several historical novels and supernatural and speculative fiction. His stories of Professor George Edward Challenger in The Lost World (1912) and other adventures blended science fact with fantastic romance, and were very popular.
