Birthdays

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1959-1930)
Novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, physician

Born of a large Scottish, Catholic, family, Doyle fell away from faith generally over his youth and eventually became a world-renowned proponent of a mystical spiritualism that got him into some embarrassing public rows, in his last decade, over issues like whether fairies exist, and if Harry Houdini had supernatural powers (Houdini, a debunker, insisted he didn’t; Doyle insisted he knew the real deal when he saw its aura).

Graduating from the University of Edinburgh’s medical school in 1881, he worked as a ship’s surgeon on a Greenland whaler, then a vessel bound for West Africa. He obtained a further degree in 1883, and studied ophthalmology in Vienna in 1890. He practiced briefly and unsuccessfully, in Portsmouth  and Plymouth, then set up in London after his return from the Continent. In his downtime, he wrote stories (he first published a mystery tale while in med school), and, after a number of rejections, sols A Study in Scarlet to a magazine in 1886.  The debut of Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, was followed by The Sign of Four in 1890; after it Doyle, feeling ill-used by his publisher, moved to The Strand Magazine, with which his Holmes stories are forever linked.

Though the Holmes stories (they eventually reached 56, plus four novels, by the time of the last one in 1927), were remarkable successes, the public clamor for more of them annoyed Doyle, and as early as 1891 he was thinking of killing off his detective. Talked out of it, he sharply raised his prices, thinking to kill off demand; his publishers cheerfully paid, and Doyle rapidly became one of the best-paid authors in Britain.

Doyle did kill Holmes off in 1893, but could only hold off the demands for more until 1901, when he revealed Holmes, for his own reasons, had faked his death at the Reichenbach Falls a decade earlier.

Doyle’s notoriety from the Holmes stories  subsidized his larger literary ambitions; between 1888 and 1906 he produced seven historical novels many consider his best work as a writer. Nine other novels on various topics followed; along with plays, pamphlets and- between 1912 and 1929, the Professor Challenger series, about an unorthodox scientist-explorer. As popular as the Holmes stories, they have suffered over time from being made, consistently, into some of the worst films imaginable- particularly, the best adventure of the lot, The Lost World.

Some have made the case that Doyle was also the mastermind of the famous Piltdown Man hoax of 1912, in which a medieval human skull matched with a 500 year-old orangutan jaw was peddled as a new, “English” species of ancient man.

The Holmes stories, however, are Doyle’s ticket to a sort of literary immortality, subsuming the author into his character. Holmes is continually being reinvented, generation after generation. The game will be afoot forever.

Related sites:

Project Gutenberg: Works of Conan Doyle (free downloads)

Facebook: Arthur Conan Doyle, Author

The New York Times’ obituary, July 8, 1930

The Conan Doyle Estate