"I remarked to my mother with precocious wisdom that it was easy to get people into scrapes," Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography, Memories and Adventures, "but not so easy to get them out again, which is surely the experience of every writer of adventures." Doyle found himself personally in this precarious situation with the most famous character of his creation--Sherlock Holmes. He had decided to kill off his famous detective because he felt that Holmes was overshadowing his writing career. That caused a huge uproar with the general public, and Doyle had to extricate himself from it by awkwardly resurrecting the sleuth a few years later.

Doyle was a prolific writer, producing work in many genres--from historical fiction to history to spiritualism. During his lifetime, however, Doyle was resentful that his Sherlock Holmes stories almost completely eclipsed his other work. While the public clamored for more...