Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1859–1930

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (knighted 1902), nephew to Richard Doyle, was born in Edinburgh and educated at Stonyhurst and in Germany. He studied Medicine at Edinburgh and practised at Southsea (1882–90). His debut was a story in Chambers’s Journal in 1879; A Study in Scarlet (1888), Micah Clarke and The White Company (1891) were early stories. But it was by the preternatural acumen of the detective hero of his Adventures (1891) and Memoirs (1893) of Sherlock Holmes (originally in the Strand Magazine) that he became wildly known. Later novels include Brigadier Gerard (1896), Rodney Stone, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Lost World, The Poison Belt (1913); in 1894 he wrote a one-act play, A Story of Waterloo. He served in 1900 as Doctor in the South African War and wrote on it, on the First World War, and also, as a believer, on spiritualism.