Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and trained there as a physician. The formative encounter of his life was not literary but clinical: his teacher Joseph Bell, a surgeon who could deduce a patient’s trade, travels, and habits from a glance before asking a single question. Doyle set up practice, found patients scarce, and filled the empty hours writing. Out of Bell’s parlor-trick genius he built Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes appeared in 1887 and became, with the short stories collected as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1892, the most popular character in English fiction — popular enough that when Doyle killed him off in 1893, readers wore mourning bands and the public would not let it stand. He resurrected him, reluctantly, and never entirely forgave him. Doyle wanted to be remembered for his historical novels; posterity, with its usual tact, remembered the detective.

His life outside Baker Street was crowded and often surprising: he served as a physician in the Boer War, wrote a defense of British conduct there, campaigned to overturn two wrongful criminal convictions using precisely the methods he had given Holmes, and spent his last years as a committed and much-mocked advocate of spiritualism. The stories survive all of it. They are the pattern from which every detective since has been cut: the impossible fact, the patient reading of evidence, the world made legible again.

More on Doyle at Wikipedia.