Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859. His father and mother were of Irish descent, but living in Scotland.   His father was an artist and also a civil servant, but he had psychiatric problems and became depend on alcohol, so he sank into poverty. Arthur and his family suffered from this, but he had richer uncles who helped out, and sent him to Stonyhurst, a famous Jesuit school, to get a good education.

He didn’t enjoy the school as the discipline was harsh and the teaching old fashioned.  He began to drift away from the Catholic faith he had been reared in, and became an agnostic…   But in later years, he turned to various mystical beliefs, including spiritualism... which suggested that he needed some kind of religious or spiritual dimension.

As a boy he went to a school in Austria to learn German and in 1878, went to Edinburgh University to study medicine.  While studying, he took an interest in botany and also began to try writing short stories.   When he graduated, he continued to study for further qualifications but took jobs as ships doctors.  After a couple of years, he set up his own medical practice but it was not a success and he had a lot of spare time, waiting for patients.   He began to study ophthalmology, but his efforts to make a career in this were also unsuccessful.

He had begun to write the Sherlock Holmes stories, about a cool minded, scientific genius detective who was partly based on Doyle’s teacher at University, Joseph Bell.   In the early 1890s, he began to get them published in the Strand Magazine and they took off, becoming very popular.

However while he was making good money, he wanted to write other sorts of work – and was to write science fiction and historical fiction as well as Holmes.   He got annoyed that Holmes was so much more popular than his other work, and he tried to kill the character off, hoping to find time to work on his other interests.   But the public demand was so great, that after having Holmes fall over the Reichenbach Falls and die, he had to bring him back from the dead.

In 1903 he published his new Sherlock story, and he had to “retcon” the fall which had killed him, explaining that only Moriarty, his great enemy had fallen and that Holmes had survived and lived secretly for a few years.

He wrote novels and plays based on the Napoleonic wars, which he regarded as more substantial than his detective fiction.

He was keen on games, including football, cricket and golf... And he worked as a doctor during the Boer war.   

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