The life, times and personal challenges of one of the world's most beloved crime fiction writers.
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Early Years
Born on May 22, 1859, Conan was originally a middle name, which Doyle later adopted as part of a surname. At the age of nine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was sent to a Jesuit preparatory school and by the time he left in 1875, he rejected Christianity and became an agnostic. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh from 1876 to 1881, and then served as a ship's doctor on a voyage to the West African coast. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle set up practice in Plymouth in 1882 and achieved his doctorate in 1885.
Medicine, Marriage and Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's medical practice was very successful and although his first literary creation occurred when he was 20 and appeared in "Chamber's Edinburgh Journal", he now began to indulge more extensively in literature. In 1885, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle married Louisa Hawkins, who suffered from tuberculosis and died in 1906. He remarried in 1907 to Joan Leckie and he fathered five children in his lifetime, two with his first wife and three with the second. Sherlock Holmes first appeared in "A Study In Scarlet", which was featured in "Beeton's Christmas Annual" for 1887. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character was modeled after his former professor, Joseph Bell.
In 1890 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle moved to London. At this time, he was considering killing off Sherlock Holmes so that he could spend more time with his historical novels. Both Holmes and his nemesis, Moriarty plunged to their deaths down a waterfall in "The Final Problem," but public outcry forced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to bring him back to life. In "The Adventure of the Empty House" fans learn that only Moriarty was killed and the great detective lived on to appear in 56 stories and four novels.
Spiritualism and Death
In his later years, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became involved with spiritualism. After the death of many family members including his son, Kingsley, he sank deeply into depression and found solace in the thought that there was life beyond the grave. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became friends with Harry Houdini who was a prominent opponent of the The Spiritualist Movement. The two men had a public falling out when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle refused to accept Houdini's feats of magic as tricks and insisted that the magician had supernatural powers.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died of a heart attack in 1930 at the age of seventy-one and is buried in the Church Yard at Minstead in the New Forest, Hampshire, England.
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