Scottish Authors > Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle Short story writer, Novelist, Journalist & Doctor 1859-1930

Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, 22nd May 1859, to Roman Catholic parents of Irish origin. Educated locally and by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst College, the boy then graduated from Edinburgh University in medicine in 1881. His first short story had been published in Chambers's journal in September 1879, and his first non-fiction in the British medical journal the same month.

A crude, unpublished story from this time shows him experimenting with two lead characters, a daring master of arcane scientific perceptions and a down-to-earth narrator inviting audience identification, but it was not until 1886 that the ultimate development of the two types came to life in A Study in scarlet, as the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his fellow-lodger Dr Watson. Their brilliant, ironic, infectious dialogue, to be continued over fifty six short stories and four novels in all, originally derived from Plato's Socrates and his disciples, Cervantes's Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and James Boswell's conversations with Dr Samuel Johnson, but many of the initial strokes of characterisation derived from Conan Doyle's medical teachers, fellow-students, and former Jesuit masters.

Conan Doyle also acknowledged his debt to Edgar Allan Poe, father of the detective-story, but for all of his readiness to belittle his own creation by comparison, Sherlock Holmes became inescapably identified as the heroic Great Detective, all the more when Conan Doyle, fearing Holmes would eclipse his historical fiction, tried to kill him off in 1893. The interval between the high drama of The Final problem where Holmes apparently sacrifices his life to eliminate the "Napoleon of Crime" Professor Moriarty, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, his reappearance eight years later, gave his creator space to produce the finest series of historical short stories ever written, the exploits of the Napoleonic soldier, Etienne Gerard, miniature revitalisations of the past admirably counterpointing Tolstoy's War and Peace.

Conan Doyle's long stories included medieval narratives of the fourteenth-century nomadic soldiery, of the Monmouth Rebellion and the Huguenots, of Regency England and of Arab revolt in the Sudan. But the short story was his classical art-form, and the precision, clarity, wit, pace, atmosphere, intellectual debate were achieved initially through training in case-study narrative from his medical education. Very appropriately, his later work included science-fiction adventures once again utilising learned but hilarious Edinburgh academics as models, the Professor Challenger stories.

The popularity of so much of Conan Doyle's work stood in the way of its academic recognition but the Holmes tales have now received critical editions and the Gerard has won scholarly presentation. Conan Doyle himself practised in Portsmouth as a doctor from 1882, but abandoned medicine for literature in 1891, moving to London, and later to Sussex and Essex. He became a Spiritualist after World War I (of which he had written histories), a religious interest which enhanced his tales of the macabre. He died in 1930 having been married twice and fathered five children.

Owen Dudley Edwards

Search Scotland's Culture for more by & about this author. Link will open in a new window.