Conan Doyle/Trivia

**Trivia**
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*This trivia is about the **real-life writer** the character is based on, written by our wiki's contributors. Please be critical about the following information and do not take everything as truth, especially any unsourced trivia. A good, trustworthy trivia has many accessible sources listed. If you have sources to provide or additions to make, please do it within our wiki's User Conduct.*

* Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a Scottish author, born in Edinburgh. He was the second child of Charles Doyle, a British painter, and Mary Foley, who was Irish. He had 9 siblings.
* In 1881, he was graduated with Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degrees from the University of Edinburgh. He met some future authors who also attended this university, including James M. Barrie and Stephen Louis Stevenson.  He was highly impressed by one of his professors, Dr. Joseph Bell, who had incredible observation skills. This master of deduction was his inspiration for his literary creation, Sherlock Holmes.
* After graduating, he served for four months as a ship's surgeon on the *SS Mayumba*, travelling to the West African coast. In 1882, he opened his own office in Portsmouth. As he wasn't really successful at the beginning, he wrote some stories while waiting for his patients.
* Sherlock Holmes' first adventure was *A Study in Scarlet*, published in 1887 in the Beeton's Christmas Annual. The detective appears in total in 4 novels and 56 short stories.
* Although Conan Doyle is mostly known for his creation of Sherlock Holmes, he also wrote science-fiction and historical novels, as well as plays and poems.
* In 1900, he was a volunteer doctor for the British army during the Second Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902). During the same year, he published a book, *The Great Boer War*, as well as a short work, *The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct*. The latter work was probably the reason why he was knighted in 1902.
* In 1891, he though about killing Holmes because he wanted to devote himself to other things he considered more important, such as his historical novels. In 1893, he published the short story *The Final Problem*, where the detective disappears with the Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. It offered a glorious ending for Holmes, who managed to kill a criminal so powerful and dangerous that any further case would be trivial in comparison, as the detective himself says in the story. However, under the readers' pressure and for financial purposes, he is forced to write new Sherlock Holmes' adventures. The first story he wrote after the *Final Problem* was *The Hound of the Baskervilles* (1901) - although the plot takes place before the Reichenbach Falls. *The Adventure of the Empty House* followed in 1903, where the reader discovers Holmes survived, unlike Moriarty, and lived hidden to fight Moriarty's organisation, including Sebastian Moran.
* Conan Doyle married two wives. Louisa Hawkins was the sister of one of Doyle's patients but she died of tuberculosis. One year after her death, he married Jean Elizabeth Leckie. He had five children: Mary Louise and Arthur Alleyne Kingsley from his first wife, and Denis Percy Stewart, Adrian Malcom and Jean Lena Annette from his second wife.
* Conan Doyle died in his home in Crowborough, East Sussex, UK, in 1930. He died of a heart attack, at the age of 71.
* John Dickson Carr, a writer and admirer of Sherlock Holmes' creator, wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's biography in 1949, *The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*.

## References

1. ↑ Arthur Conan Doyle website: https://www.arthurconandoyle.com/biography.html