1859-1930 · Scottish physician and writer, creator of the detective Sherlock Holmes
About Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh and trained in medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where the surgeon Joseph Bell's habit of reading a patient's history from small details gave him a model for Holmes. He practised as a physician at Southsea, near Portsmouth, where he wrote the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887). In 1891, after studying the eye in Vienna, he set up briefly as an eye specialist in London and wrote the early short stories while waiting for patients. He went on to write historical novels, served as a volunteer doctor in South Africa during the Boer War, was knighted in 1902, and wrote some sixty Holmes stories in all.
“Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog.”
1892 (stories 1891-92) · 19th Century · Short Stories
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects the first twelve short stories about the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, each narrated by his friend Dr. John Watson. In A Scandal in Bohemia the King of Bohemia hires Holmes to recover a compromising photograph from the singer Irene Adler; Holmes, disguised first as a groom and then as a clergyman, tricks her into revealing its hiding place, but she sees through him and escapes with her new husband, leaving Holmes the admiring loser.
1902 (serialized 1901-02) · Early 20th Century · Novel
The Hound of the Baskervilles brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to Dartmoor to investigate a family curse. It opens in Baker Street with a walking stick left by a visitor, from which Holmes deduces a young country doctor with a curly-haired spaniel.