This day in history, Sherlock Holmes author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle passes away

Author: Komal Zaheer

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author most famous for introducing the world to Sherlock Holmes was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland to a prosperous Irish-Catholic family. His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was a moderately successful artist, who was also a chronic alcoholic. Due to his father’s excessive drinking, the family was always short on money and Arthur’s education was financed by some of the wealthier Doyles.

His childhood was one filled with vivacious storytelling and he was greatly influenced by his mother’s knack for it. In his autobiography he states, “In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life.” Although his own father was a moderately successful artist and he was enthralled by stories, Doyle chose to make a career out of medicine. While at the University of Edinburgh, Doyle met a number of influential personalities like Robert Louis Stevenson and James Barrie, however it was one of his teachers, Dr. Joseph Bell whose keen sense of logic and inference really stuck with the young man. This is evident in his characterization of his most celebrated character, Sherlock Holmes who shared similar qualities in the art of deduction and observation.

-Drawing by Sidney Paget-

Although Doyle wrote other more serious forms of writing including seven historical novels, which he and many critics regarded as his best work, he also authored nine other novels and a number of short stories in The Strand Magazine such as The Captain of the Pole-Star, all his other work was seriously overshadowed by the immortal story of the detective and his loyal companion Dr. Watson.

-A 1900’s The Study in Scarlet bookcover-

Doyle wrote his first Sherlock Holmes novel in 1886 when he wrote A Study in Scarlet which received good reviews and led to the commissioning of a sequel, The Sign of the Four. Although Holmes was what catapulted Doyle to fame and established him as the most well paid author of his time, he wished to do away with it as he thought it to be too “commercial” and in an attempt to end the tale once and for all, he plunged both Holmes and his arch nemesis Professor Moriarty to their deaths at The Reichenbach Falls when he published The Final Problem, in December 1893. This decision caused such mass outrage, as fans cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine, that Doyle was forced to reincarnate Holmes first in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) and then to publish The Return of Sherlock Holmes in 1903

-Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson-

No matter how hard Doyle tried, he could not get rid of his world famous detective that had by now a huge fan following including King Edward VII who had also knighted Conan Doyle and encouraged him to write more Sherlock novels.

Towards the end of his career and his life when Doyle lost his son, his brother, his two brothers-in-law and his two nephews due to World War 1, both he and his second wife became interested in spiritualism, took a great liking to the occult and even helped fuel the mystery of the Cottingley Fairies which he believed to be real. He and his family travelled far and wide on physic crusades when finally in 1929 he was diagnosed with Angina Pectoris and suffered a great deal before finally succumbing to it a year later on the 9th of July. His last words were to his wife when he told her, “You are wonderful.”

-BBC’s 2010 series, SHERLOCK-

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes has survived on to become a household name, it has been portrayed both on television and in films by great actors such as Robert Downy Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch and the adventures of the great detective still tug at the imagination of millions of his fans worldwide.