The real Arthur Conan Doyle behind Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle created the most famous fictional detective in the English language and spent much of his life trying to escape him. He killed Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893 and was forced by public pressure to resurrect him in 1901. He considered himself primarily a historical novelist. He was also, in the final decades of his life, one of the most prominent advocates for Spiritualism in Britain -- a stance that his biographers have found deeply puzzling given his creator of the world's most celebrated rationalist.

Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 in Edinburgh, into a large Catholic Irish family. He trained as a physician at the University of Edinburgh, where one of his professors, Dr Joseph Bell, was the likely model for Holmes: Bell was famous for his ability to diagnose patients' occupations, habits, and recent activities from brief physical observation.

How did he invent Sherlock Holmes?#

Doyle began writing detective fiction partly out of boredom and partly from financial necessity. His medical practice in Southsea was not thriving. He started writing the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, in 1886 and sold it to Beeton's Christmas Annual for the sum of twenty-five pounds -- a one-time payment with no royalties. The story introduced Holmes and Watson to the world and established the template: the brilliant, eccentric detective, the admiring but baffled companion, the puzzle that yields to pure logical analysis.

The stories published in The Strand Magazine from 1891 onward made Holmes a cultural phenomenon. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes -- the first collection of short stories -- sold extraordinarily well and created the first instance of what we would now call a media franchise: Holmes merchandise, stage adaptations, and a level of public identification with a fictional character that had not existed before.

Doyle grew to resent the character's dominance of his reputation. He wrote to his mother in 1891 that he was thinking of "slaying Holmes." She wrote back telling him not to. He eventually did -- in "The Final Problem" (1893), Holmes and the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty struggle at the top of the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland and both apparently die.

The public response was outrage. Doyle received letters of abuse. Young men in London wore black armbands. He was eventually persuaded to bring Holmes back in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901), set before the Reichenbach incident, and then in further stories that revealed Holmes had survived after all.

What else did he write?#

Doyle considered his historical novels -- particularly the Brigadier Gerard stories and The White Company (1891) and Sir Nigel (1906) -- his most serious literary work. They are well-regarded adventure fiction but have not lasted in the way Holmes has lasted.

His science fiction, particularly The Lost World (1912), featuring the irascible Professor Challenger discovering a plateau in South America where dinosaurs survive, has had significant cultural afterlife -- the template for countless subsequent lost-world narratives.

What was his relationship with Spiritualism?#

This is the aspect of Doyle's biography that most surprises readers who know him only through Holmes. From around 1916 onward, Doyle became an increasingly committed advocate for Spiritualism -- the belief that the living could communicate with the dead through mediums. He lost his son Kingsley and his brother Innes in World War One, and many biographers believe this grief drove him toward beliefs that promised connection with the dead.

He toured the world lecturing on Spiritualism. He famously endorsed the Cottingley Fairies photographs in 1917 -- photographs taken by two girls in Yorkshire that purportedly showed real fairies, and which were fakes, a fact not publicly confirmed until the girls themselves admitted it in 1983.

His friendship with Harry Houdini, the escape artist and prominent debunker of fake mediums, collapsed over Spiritualism. Doyle believed Houdini had genuine supernatural powers that he was concealing. Houdini thought Doyle had lost his critical faculties.

Doyle died on 7 July 1930. His last words, directed to his wife, were reportedly: "You are wonderful."

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Further reading#

For the best Sherlock Holmes stories and where to start, the best Sherlock Holmes stories to read first covers the full range.

For books like Holmes if you want to continue in the detective tradition, books like Sherlock Holmes: classic mysteries and detectives has the recommendations.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is free on Foxing.

Sources#

• Andrew Lycett, Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007
• Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Holt, 1999
• The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia