Arthur Conan Doyle

There are men whose minds work like engines: precise, tireless, always observing. Arthur Conan Doyle was such a man. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859, he trained as a doctor at Edinburgh University, where a professor named Joseph Bell caught his attention. Bell could look at a stranger and deduce his profession, his habits, his history, from a callus on the hand or a stain on the cuff. Doyle watched and remembered. Years later, when he sat down to write, he gave those powers to a character who would become the most famous detective in the English language.

Sherlock Holmes first appeared in A Study in Scarlet in 1887, accompanied by his loyal companion Dr. Watson — a narrator who asks the questions readers want answered, and who is always, reliably, astonished. More stories followed: The Sign of the Four, the collected Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the novel that fans consider among his finest, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Doyle himself sometimes grew impatient with his famous creation, feeling that Holmes kept him from his other work — historical novels, adventure tales, the Professor Challenger stories — and once tried to be rid of him altogether. The public would not allow it. Letters of protest arrived in great numbers. Holmes came back.

What drove Doyle as a writer was, at heart, a doctor’s instinct: the belief that careful attention to small things reveals large truths. He wanted stories that moved, that surprised, that rewarded the reader who paid close attention. He lived a full and restless life — he served as a war correspondent, campaigned to free men he believed had been wrongly convicted, and in his later years pursued a deep interest in the spirit world. He died in 1930, having given the world a figure who, in the minds of many readers, never really died at all.