Arthur Conan Doyle was a British author and physician whose creation of Sherlock Holmes placed him among the most influential writers in the history of popular fiction. Born in Edinburgh in 1859, he trained as a doctor before turning to writing, drawing on his medical background to shape Holmes's famous method of deductive reasoning - itself modelled partly on the diagnostic techniques of his mentor Joseph Bell.
The first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887, and the character's popularity quickly outpaced everything else Doyle wrote. Doyle's own attitude to his most famous creation across the decades that followed was famously complicated, and the long publication history of the Holmes stories from 1887 through 1927 reflects considerably more authorial reluctance and reconsideration than most of his readers ever quite realised.
Outside Holmes, Doyle wrote historical novels, science fiction including the Professor Challenger series, and was a prominent public figure with strong interests in spiritualism in his later years.
