Arthur Conan Doyle was born at Picardy Place, Edinburgh, as the son of Charles Altamont Doyle , a civil servant in the Edinburgh Office of Works, and Mary (Foley) Doyle. To increase his income Charles Altamont painted, made book illustrations, and also worked as a sketch artist on criminal trials. Not long after arriving Edinburgh he started to drink, he suffered from epilepsy and was eventually institutionalized. Doyle's mother was interested in literature, and she encouraged his son to take to books. Doyle read voluminously. At the age of fourteen he had learned French so that he read Jules Verne in the author's original language. Charles Altamot died in an asylum in 1893; in the same year Doyle decided to finish permanently the adventures of his master detective. Because of financial problems, Doyle's mother kept a boarding house.
Doyle was educated in Jesuit schools. During this period Doyle lost his belief in the Roman Catholic faith but the training of the Jesuits influenced deeply his mental development. Later he used his friends and teachers from Stonyhurst College as models for his characters in the Holmes stories, among them two boys named Moriarty. He studied at Edinburgh University and in 1884 he married Louise Hawkins. Doyle qualified as doctor in 1885. After graduation Doyle practiced medicine as an eye specialist at Southsea near Porsmouth in Hampshire until 1891 when he became a full time writer. Doyle had produced his first story, an illustrated tale of a man and a tiger, at the age of six. Doyle's first story about Holmes, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887 in Beeton Christmas Annual. The novel was written in three weeks in 1886. It introduced the detective and his Sancho Panza and Boswell, Dr. Watson, the narrator of the stories. Their major opponent was the evil genius Moriarty, the classic villain and a kind of doppelganger of Holmes. Also the intrigues of the beautiful opera singer Irene Adler caused much trouble to Holmes.
The second Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of the Four', was written for the Lippincott's Magazine. The story collects a colorful group of people together, among them Jonathan Small who has a wooden leg and a dwarf from Tonga islands. The Strand Magazine started to publish 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' from July 1891. Holmes's address at Mrs. Hudson's house, 221B Baker Street, London, became soon the most famous London street in literature. However, already at the end of 1891, Doyle planned to end the series and in 1893 he became so wearied of his detective that he devised his death in the 'Final Problem,' published in the Strand in the December issue.
Doyle's readers expressed their disappointment by wearing mourning bands and Strand lost 20,000 subscriptions. In The Hound of Baskervilles (1902) Doyle narrated an early case of the dead detective. The ingenious murder weapon in the story is an animal. Because of public demand Doyle resurrected his popular hero in The Empty House (1903).
In these following stories Holmes stopped using cocaine, but although Doyle's later works have been criticized, several of them, including 'The Three Garridebs,' 'The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,' and 'The Veiled Lodger,' are highly enjoyable. Sherlock Holmes short stories were collected in five books. The first appeared in 1892 under the title The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The later were The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904), His Last Bow (1917), and The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes (1927).
During the South African war (1899-1902) Doyle served for a few months as senior physician at a field hospital, and wrote The War in South Africa, in which he defended England's policy. The same uncritical attitude marked his history of World War I, THE BRITISH CAMPAIGN IN FRANCE AND FLANDERS, 1928 (6 vols.). Doyle was knighted in 1902 and in 1900 and 1906 he also ran unsuccessfully for Parliament. Fourteen months after his long-invalided wife Louisa died, Conan Doyle married in 1907 his second wife, Jean Leckie. When his son Kingsley died from wounds incurred in World War I, the author dedicated himself in spiritualistic studies. An example of these is The Coming of Fairies (1922). But he had already showed interest in occult fantasy before publishing Holmes stories. In his early novel, THE MYSTERY OF CLOOMBER (1888), a retired general finds himself under assault by Indian magic.
Doyle supported the existence of "little people" and spent more than a million dollars on their cause. The so-called "fairy photographs" caused an international sensation when Doyle published a favorable account of them in 1920. The photographs showed fairies dancing in the air. A year after, the Star newspaper reported that the faries were from a poster. Doyle became president of several important spiritualist organizations. In 1925 he opened the Psychic Bookshop in London. Among his friends was the legendary American magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (1874-1926). He believed that Houdini possessed supernatural powers, which the magician himself denied. Another friend was D.D. Home. According to Doyle, he could levitate. Once Doyle claimed that Home "floated out of the bedroom and into the sitting room window, passing seventy feet above the street." His own psychic experiences Doyle recorded in The Edge of Unknown (1930), which was his last book.
Doyle died on July 7, 1930 from heart disease at his home, Windlesham, Sussex.
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