Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)

So great is the influence of Sherlock Holmes, that only the truest of the great detective's fans know that his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, thought far less of Holmes than he did of his other creative efforts. For Doyle was not a stock-in-trade mystery writer, a genre that was still finding its legs. He certainly had not "invented" the genre of detective fiction, a privilege that belonged to Edgar Allan Poe and his own creation, master detective August Dupin. Although Doyle claimed that Holmes had been modeled on his medical school teacher, Dr. Joseph Bell, the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as Emile Gaboriau, Charles Dickens, Eugene Vidocq, and Wilkie Collins, were what provided Doyle with the basic elements for building his mythic detective.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859 in Edinburgh, the eldest son of Charles Altimont Doyle and his wife, Mary Foley. Doyle's father, a builder and designer in the Edinburgh Public WorksOffice, was from a staunchly Catholic family. In 1869, Doyle was enrolled in Hodder Preparatory, a Jesuit school in Lancashire. Two years later he attended the Jesuit college, Stonyhurst School, also in Lancashire. Upon graduating, he traveled to Austria, where he spent a year studying German in Feldkirch School before entering Edinburgh University in 1876 to study medicine. Despite his Jesuit education, Doyle's year in Austria proved a major turning point, as a crisis of faith led him to abandon his Catholic upbringing for a studied agnosticism. This change in religious perspective, based on his own faith in scientific reasoning, prepared Doyle for the rigors of medical school.

Interestingly, it was Doyle's avowed agnosticism and unwavering commitment to honest dealing that led to his becoming a writer. After he informed his father's well-to-do family of his religious disillusionment, all social and financial help was withdrawn. Barely able to support himself, Doyle turned in his third year in medical school to writing fiction for extra cash, using as material his own adventures serving while in school as a ship's doctor on a whaling vessel to the Antarctic and later on an African freighter. Between the few stories he published, which paid just enough to keep him and his family afloat, Doyle racked up a good number of rejections before achieving steady work as a writer.

In 1882, Doyle established a private practice in Southsea, Portsmouth. Three years later, he married Louise Hawkins, whose own small family income offered him greater freedom to write more. His first novel, The Firm of Girdlestone, written in 1886, was soundly rejected by the British publishing industry and did not see publication until 1890. His next work was his first Sherlock Holmes story, the novella A Study in Scarlet, which after several initial rejections, was published in the 1887 issue of Beeton's Christmas Annual. Despite Doyle's faith in the quality and originality of the story's hero, A Study in Scarlet gained little notice among readers. His next novel, however, Micah Clarke (1889), caused a great stir after its publication—following the usual round of rejections by British publishers—by Andrew Lang, as chief editor at Longmans Publishing Company. Micah Clarke, a story about the dangers of fanaticism, was Doyle's first work of historical fiction and an immediate success, propelling the author into literary stardom in England.

Meanwhile, despite the poor showing Holmes had made in his creator's home country, Doyle's detective fared quite well in the United States, where a request for another story about the master detective was made to Doyle while he was deep in his next historical novel, The White Company (1890). As soon as Doyle had completed The White Company, which was to be his personal favorite, he dashed off The Sign of Four (1890) which was, once again, well received in America. Fortunately for Doyle, Holmes' stock, despite his poor initial showing, was beginning to rise in England by leaps and bounds. In July 1891, Doyle wrote his first of six Sherlock Holmes tales for The Strand, making Doyle England's most popular serialized fiction writer. Doyle continued to write Sherlock Holmes stories over the next two years until he decided to have Holmes killed by his arch-nemesis, Dr. Moriarty, in December 1893, with the story "The Final Problem."

Doyle's decision was a momentous one. Holmes' death was met with howls of outrage and large-scale subscription cancellations of the magazine. The pressure on Doyle was enormous to continue the series, but he was adamant about letting Holmes rest in peace. As it was, the production of a Holmes story for serial publication proved to be an enormous strain on Doyle's creative powers, draining precious energy that he thought better spent on his now little known historicalnovels, such as Rodney Stone (1896) and Uncle Bernac (1897). In the early 1900s, Doyle added to his output two works of historical nonfiction, The Great Boer War (1900) and The War in South Africa (1902), which sought not only to document the Boer War but to defend the British role in it.

In 1901, Doyle published The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Holmes was reintroduced to solve one of his older cases. By 1903, Doyle had accepted an American offer of $5,000 per story for a series of new tales about the great detective, regardless of how many Doyle wrote or how often. Doyle continued to write stories of Holmes and his companion Watson over the next 20 years, although they tended to appear in short bursts, when they appeared at all. After Holmes' resurrection, Doyle's early passion for historical fiction sought an outlet in other genres, such as the scientific romance, resulting in the writing of The Lost World (1912), The Poison Belt (1913), and The Land of Mist (1926). Concurrent with these began a spate of Spiritualist works that included The New Revelation (1918), The Vital Message (1919), The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921), The Coming of the Fairies (1922), and the two-volume History of Spiritualism (1926).

Many consider Doyle's turn to spiritualism at the end of his life one of the strangest events to occur in the life of a man whose greatest creation was a detective who drew his conclusions from a hard and cold reality that disavowed all things supernatural. Few, however, recognize the important nuances in Doyle's thoughts about spiritualism, as well as the nuances within the spiritualist movement itself, which sought to treat spirits as a scientific reality, a view that Doyle favored. Doyle, after all, was an agnostic, not an atheist, and there is little doubt that notwithstanding his medical training and belief in scientific method, he remained unable to reconcile the loss of his childhood Catholic faith with his belief in a greater good that directed human conduct and morals. Indeed, Holmes' own work as a detective of "setting the world to rights" suggests a moral imperative that is explained more by Doyle's faith—in goodness, in man, and perhaps even in God—than his reason.

Carr, John Dickson. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York, Harper, 1949.

Clausen, Christopher. "Sherlock Holmes, Order, and the Late-Victorian Mind." Georgia Review. Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring 1984, 104-123.

Green, R.L., editor. A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle. London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1983.

Nordon, Pierre. Conan Doyle: A Biography, trans. Frances Partridge.London, John Murray, 1966.

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