Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on May 22, 1859, and trained as a doctor. He set up a practice that attracted very few patients, and he wrote in the empty hours between appointments that didn’t arrive.
That’s the origin of the most famous character in English popular fiction: a failing medical practice and a man with nothing to do.
I find that origin more moving than any story about genius. He sat in an empty office waiting for patients who never came, and he used the dead hours instead of moping through them. I’ve got a lot of respect for a man who treats boredom as working time, because plenty of people with far better luck produced far less.
He wrote about sixty Holmes stories across forty years, alongside historical novels he considered far more important, a body of science fiction, war reporting, and a two-volume history of spiritualism that he regarded as his real life’s work.
The proportions there are the interesting part. Sixty stories about a detective, written over four decades by a man who considered them a distraction, against a much larger body of work he took seriously and almost nobody now opens. He was wrong about which was which, and he was wrong in public and at length.
He was also a doctor, an athlete, a war correspondent, a parliamentary candidate twice over, and a campaigner who personally overturned two criminal convictions. The writing was one activity among several. That’s unusual for somebody whose creation is this famous, and it shows in the fiction’s brisk unsentimental competence.
Incidentally, he was knighted for a pamphlet defending British conduct in the Boer War, not for anything in the fiction, which he’d probably have considered the correct order of importance.
The childhood behind that’s harder than the biography usually admits. His father was an alcoholic who was eventually institutionalized, and the family survived on relatives and on his mother’s determination. Wealthy uncles paid for his schooling. That meant seven years at a Jesuit boarding school he disliked intensely.
He credited his mother with everything to do with storytelling. She told him tales continuously through his childhood, and he said the vivid sense of narrative he’d came from watching her do it. Medicine was chosen for practical reasons and he wasn’t a natural student. He took a post as ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler at twenty, then on a West African steamer, and both trips left him with material and a clearer sense that he didn’t want the life he was training for. The Southsea practice failed slowly instead of dramatically. He hung out a plate, waited, and used the hours nobody arrived in to write. That’s a detail worth holding onto for anyone whose day job is currently not working out. Through all of it he was also writing constantly, and by the time Holmes appeared in 1887 he had been publishing short fiction anonymously in magazines for the better part of a decade without anybody knowing his name.
Where did Sherlock Holmes come from?
From a lecturer at the Edinburgh medical school. Joseph Bell taught diagnosis by observation, and made a performance of it. He’d look at a patient in front of a class and state their occupation, recent travel and habits from physical evidence alone, then explain the chain of inference that got him there. Conan Doyle worked as his clerk and watched him do it repeatedly. Holmes is that method transferred from diagnosis to crime. That’s why the detective behaves like a physician and why the stories are structured as case histories.
The observation for a writer is that the character came from a real technique observed closely instead of from imagination. The most distinctive thing in the work is something he saw somebody do and then moved into a different profession.
This is my favorite fact about Holmes. The most famous detective in English came from a clerk paying close attention to his boss. Writers who insist good characters have to come from pure imagination are making their own work harder, and I think they’re wrong about where the best ones come from.
What did Conan Doyle fix about the detective story?
Poe invented the form. Conan Doyle made it repeatable, and repeatable is what creates a genre.
The pieces he standardized are still in use. A brilliant detective with a signature method.
A companion of ordinary intelligence who narrates, so the companion can explain the detective’s reasoning without the detective explaining himself. A client arriving with a problem in the opening pages. Physical evidence available to the reader at the same time as the detective. A reveal in which the detective walks through the chain of inference in order.
The narrator is the essential invention. Watson exists so that he can tell the reader things without the story stopping, and so the detective can be observed from outside instead of explaining his own brilliance. Every detective duo since is running that arrangement.
It also solves the reader’s problem. A story narrated by a genius has no tension, because the reader is inside a mind that already knows. Narrated by a competent man who’s a step behind, the same events become a puzzle.
I’d argue with anybody who plays Watson as a bumbling sidekick. The books need him competent, because a fool narrating makes Holmes look cheap and a capable man one step behind makes him look like a giant.
Why did Arthur Conan Doyle kill Sherlock Holmes?
Because the character was consuming the career he wanted.
He considered his historical novels the serious work and Holmes a commercial distraction that had grown out of control. In 1893 he sent the detective over a waterfall with his adversary, and by his own account felt relief instead of regret. The public reaction was extreme. Readers canceled subscriptions to the magazine. People wore mourning bands. The pressure and the money continued for years, and eventually he wrote a novel set before the death, and then brought the character back properly with an explanation.
There’s a hard lesson in that sequence for any writer who succeeds at something they didn’t intend to be known for. A character that works can take the career from you, and the audience won’t accept the trade you want to make. He wrote Holmes for another twenty-seven years after killing him. My sympathy goes to Conan Doyle here. A writer should be allowed to walk away from a character, and forty years pinned to one would wear anybody down. I disagree with his belief that the popular work was automatically the lesser work.
Why does Sherlock Holmes work better in short stories?
Holmes works at short length and struggles at novel length, and the reason is structural.
Of the sixty pieces, only four are novels, and two of those spend a large middle section away from Holmes entirely, in an American backstory that reads as a separate book stapled on. The magazine had asked for stories that could be read in a sitting and didn’t require the reader to have caught the previous installment, and that constraint produced the form.
A puzzle has a natural length. Set up the problem, present the evidence, misdirect once, resolve. Stretch that across three hundred pages and you need subplots, and the subplots dilute exactly what the reader came for. The self-contained structure also did something Conan Doyle probably didn’t plan. Because each story stands alone, a reader can enter anywhere. That’s a large part of why the character stayed in circulation for a century and a half while serialized rivals died with their magazines. For a writer the observation is that the container shapes the work more than the ambition does. He wanted to write serious books and produced his permanent contribution in the format an editor asked for.
What did Conan Doyle do outside fiction?
He was a public campaigner, and twice used his fame to overturn a conviction.
In one case a man had been jailed for maiming livestock on evidence that fell apart under examination, and Conan Doyle investigated personally, published his findings, and the conviction was overturned. In another he took up the case of a man convicted of murder and kept at it for years until the man was released. He also volunteered as a doctor in the Boer War at forty, and wrote a defense of British conduct there that was considerably responsible for his knighthood.
The campaigning is the part of the biography that connects most directly to the fiction. A man who spent his working life writing about evidence being read correctly went out and did it, twice, on behalf of people the system had processed and forgotten. It also complicates the spiritualism story. The same person applied rigorous scrutiny to a criminal case and none whatsoever to a photograph of paper fairies. That suggests that rigor isn’t a general trait somebody has but a thing applied unevenly depending on what a person needs to be true.
Why did Conan Doyle defend the Cottingley fairy photographs?
The man who created the most rigorous reasoner in fiction spent his last decades defending claims that wouldn’t survive his own detective’s attention. He became a committed public advocate for spiritualism, lectured on it internationally, and spent a large portion of his fortune promoting it. He also publicly defended photographs of paper fairies taken by two girls. They were exactly what they appeared to be.
The usual account treats this as a sad decline, and it’s more complicated. He lost his son and his brother in the aftermath of the First World War, along with a great many other people, and the movement he joined was full of the bereaved. His conviction wasn’t stupidity, it was grief with an intellectual structure built around it.
The fairy business strikes me as sad far more than funny. A man who’d lost his son and his brother reached for the one movement that promised they weren’t gone. The jokes made at his expense have never seemed half as clever to me as the people making them think they are.
His friendship with Harry Houdini collapsed over exactly this. Houdini spent years exposing mediums using stage-magic knowledge, and Conan Doyle concluded that Houdini had real supernatural powers he was refusing to admit to. Neither could move the other and the friendship ended.
The observation worth carrying is that creating a rigorous character doesn’t make a writer rigorous. Holmes reasons better than his author did. That’s a thing fiction permits and reality doesn’t.
What did Conan Doyle want to be remembered for?
The historical novels, which almost nobody reads now.
The White Company and Sir Nigel are set during the Hundred Years War and were researched heavily. He put more effort into them than into anything else and considered them his contribution to literature.
I’ve got some sympathy for The White Company, but only some. Heavy research doesn’t make a book live, and a writer’s own effort is a terrible way to judge what’s worth reading. Readers chose Holmes because Holmes was alive on the page, and I think they were right to.
The Lost World is the one non-Holmes book that survived, and it did the same thing to the adventure genre that Holmes did to detection. A plateau in South America with surviving dinosaurs, an expedition to reach it, and a loud unreasonable professor who dominates every scene. Everything from King Kong forward is descended from it. There’s something instructive in a writer being wrong twice about his own work: dismissing the character who made him permanent, and championing the books that didn’t last.
What can a writer take from Conan Doyle?
Four things. Steal a real technique. Holmes is a lecturer’s diagnostic method moved into another profession. Watching somebody skilled and transplanting what they do produces something no amount of invention will.
Use a narrator one step behind. A story told by the cleverest person present has no tension. A competent observer keeps the puzzle intact and lets the reader be told things without the story stopping.
Play fair with evidence. The reader must see what the detective sees. A solution that depends on withheld information reads as a cheat, and the entire genre runs on that contract.
Expect the successful thing to take over. If something works commercially it’ll define you, and the audience won’t release you from it. Deciding in advance whether you could live with that is worth doing before the success arrives.
How should you mark Arthur Conan Doyle Day?
Read The Adventure of the Speckled Band or A Scandal in Bohemia, either of which shows the whole machine in half an hour. Or read The Hound of the Baskervilles. It’s the best of the novels and works as horror as much as detection.
If you want the other Conan Doyle, The Lost World is short, fast, and considerably better than its reputation.
If you write, do the exercise. Take a scene where a character works something out, and rewrite it from the perspective of somebody watching them who doesn’t yet understand. The information is identical and the tension is completely different.
He deserves the day more than most. He built a machine that’s still running a century and a half later and got two innocent men out of the system, all while convinced his real work lay somewhere else. I’d take his mistakes about his own books over most writers’ good judgment about theirs, because the thing he dismissed is still the model everybody copies.
I’ve also written about Sherlock Holmes’ birthday and the case for real detection, about Edgar Allan Poe who invented the form Conan Doyle perfected, and about Agatha Christie who took it somewhere else entirely.