Arthur Conan Doyle
1 book analyzed
Biography
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a Scottish physician who created Sherlock Holmes in 1887 and spent the rest of his life regretting it. He considered Holmes a distraction from his 'serious' historical novels (The White Company, Sir Nigel) and killed Holmes at Reichenbach Falls in 1893. Public outrage was extraordinary -- 20,000 subscribers cancelled their Strand Magazine subscriptions, and readers wore black armbands in mourning. Doyle resisted for eight years, then wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901 as a compromise: a Holmes story set before Reichenbach, technically not a resurrection. The novel's success made the full resurrection inevitable (1903). Doyle spent his later years as a passionate advocate for Spiritualism -- the man who created fiction's greatest rationalist became a true believer in ghosts, seances, and fairies. He defended the Cottingley Fairies photographs as genuine. The contradiction is the man.