Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (Edinburgh, May 22, 1859 – Crowborough, July 7, 1930) was a British writer and physician of Irish descent, creator of the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. He was a prolific author whose work includes science fiction stories, historical novels, drama, and poetry.

Biography

Childhood

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the son of Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary Foley. Although he signed A. Conan Doyle , might lead one to think that his last name was Conan Doyle, both the British Library and the Library of Congress catalog his works with the last name Doyle.

Arthur was baptized in the Metropolitan Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption in Edinburgh. He belonged to an Irish Catholic family that had provided a saga of illustrators and cartoonists, begun by his grandfather John Doyle and continued by his uncles, the illustrator Richard Doyle, who designed the cover and masthead for Punch magazine. i>, James Doyle antiquarian and Henry E. Doyle, director of the National Gallery of Ireland. His father, who was the youngest of John Doyle's children, grew up overshadowed by the brilliant careers of his brothers. He studied architecture and in 1849, when he turned nineteen, he accepted a job with the Edinburgh Office of Public Works. He also had a great fondness for drawing which he developed in his early years in the Scottish city with some illustrations for magazines and books. Charles Doyle would illustrate the first edition of his son's book, A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first to feature Sherlock Holmes. Throughout his life he suffered from severe alcoholism and deep depressions, which led him to be admitted to a health institution on various occasions.

His father married his mother, Mary Foley, in 1855, belonging to an Irish family residing in the Scottish city. Arthur would remember his mother as a woman as a mixture of a homebody forced to take care of the maintenance of her children and at the same time a woman of letters, a passionate reader, deeply imaginative and a great storyteller and who would be the one who would awaken Arthur's love of literature..

Details of the childhood of Arthur and his siblings are unclear. Some sources state there were nine children, some ten, although three appear to have died young. In 1864 the family broke up due to Charles's increasing alcoholism and the children were temporarily housed in various Edinburgh institutions. In 1867 the family was reunited, to live in a dingy tenement on Sciennes Place, her mother, seeing her husband spend all her wages on drink, rented the rooms in the house to boarders.; one of them, Dr. Bryan Charles Waller, to whom some historians attribute an affair with the writer's mother.^{[citation required]}

Studies and medical career

In 1868, Arthur Conan Doyle, with the financial support of his uncles, entered Stonyhurst Saint Mary's Hall School of the order of the Society of Jesus, located in Lancashire, which was a center preparatory school for the prestigious and select school, Stonyhurst College, which he would enter two years later, in 1870, and where he remained until 1875. Between 1875 and 1876, he continued his education in Austria, at another school of the Society of Jesus, Stella Matutina, in the city of Feldkirch.

In 1876, he began his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh, where he met the forensic doctor Joseph Bell, this professor would inspire him in the figure of his famous character, Sherlock Holmes. There he excelled in sports, especially rugby,^{[citation needed]} golf and boxing. During this period he also worked in Aston (present-day Birmingham district) and Sheffield. In early 1880, he embarked on a whaler named The Hope, to practice as a surgeon on behalf of a friend of his, which would sail to the Arctic for six months. At the age of twenty-two, in 1881, he graduated as a physician and completed his doctorate on Tabes dorsalis in 1885. However, he received his doctorate four years later. It was during these years that he became close friends with fellow Scottish writer J. M. Barrie.

While studying medicine, he began writing short stories. The first to appear published was "The Mystery of the Sasassa Valley", in 1879 in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal before he was twenty years old. That same year he also published his first medical article "Gelsemium as poison" in the British Medical Journal.

In 1881, after finishing his university stage, he returned to embark as a doctor on the ship SS Mayumba on its voyage to the coasts of West Africa.

In 1882, an old classmate, George Turnavine Budd, offered to work with him in Plymouth, but his relationship with Budd was difficult and he ended up setting up on his own in June 1882, aged twenty-three, in Portsmouth Due to little initial success, while he had no patients, he began again to write stories such as The Mystery of Cloomber, not published until 1888, the unfinished Narrative of John Smith, The Captain of the Pole-Star and J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement, both inspired by Doyle's marine expeditions.

While living there he also played soccer as a goalkeeper for the Portsmouth Association Football Club. On the other hand, he was a great cricket fan, and between 1900 and 1907, he played ten matches for Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), one of the oldest and most prestigious clubs in the world. Likewise, he was a member of a cricket team formed by J. M. Barrie and which other famous writers of the time also played in. He also played golf.

In 1885 he married Louise Hawkins (1857-1906), better known as Touie, with whom he had two children: Mary Louise (1889-1976) and Arthur Alleyne Kingsley (1892-1918). His wife died of tuberculosis on July 4, 1906, after the family's stay in Switzerland to try to get her to recover. A year later, he married the medium Jean Elizabeth Leckie (1874-1940), after twenty years of platonic love, and they had three more children: Jean Lena Annette (1912-1997), Denis Percy Stewart (1909-1955) and Adrian Malcolm (1910-1970). His second wife would die a decade after him, on June 27, 1940.

Literary experience

Image of the deck of the first edition A Study in Scarlet (1888).

In 1887 he moved to London to practice as an ophthalmologist. In his biography, he clarified that no patient entered his clinic. Therefore, this gave him more time to write, especially adventures of the character that would make him immortal, Sherlock Holmes, but that Conan Doyle never appreciated. So much so that in November of that year he wrote to his mother that he wanted to "kill Sherlock Holmes, since he was wasting his mind," to which his mother replied: "people don't." it will take in a good way". Finally, he would fulfill his wish in the story titled The Final Problem. As it happened, however, the British public took the detective's death very badly, so much so that they inundated Doyle with letters ranging from pleas to threats to insults and calls for him to resurrect Holmes. After ten years of resisting, Doyle gave in and in the story entitled The Empty House made Holmes reappear (he had previously published his famous novel The Hound of the Baskervilles with enormous success)., also starring Holmes, but he had taken great care to date it before the detective's supposed 'death').

Despite the fact that The Hound of the Baskervilles consolidated the fame of this writer, the authorship of said novel has nevertheless been a matter of controversy. In the early 2000s, historian and writer Rodger Garrick-Steele accused Conan Doyle of plagiarizing the text. The author would be, according to Garrick-Steele, the journalist and friend of the defendant, Bertram Fletcher Robinson. In addition, he accused him of having been the lover of his wife's, and of having conspired with her to poison him with the idea of making it appear that Fletcher's death had occurred from natural causes.

On October 19, 1894, Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book, served Doyle a Thanksgiving dinner at his home in Brattleboro. In gratitude, Doyle gave him golf lessons during your visit. The following year they played a match together.

In 1900 he wrote his longest book, The Boer War. That same year he ran as a candidate for the Liberal Union, but despite the fact that he was a highly respected candidate, he was not elected. After the Boer War he wrote an article entitled The War in South Africa: Causes and Development , justifying the UK's involvement, which was widely translated. In his opinion, it was this that led to his being knighted in the Order of the British Empire in 1902, bestowing him with the title of sir.

Over the years his claim about a Robert Louis Stevenson short story (The Links Pavilion) has become famous, declaring it to be the pinnacle of narrative technique. Despite his popularity, she did not receive any award throughout her entire career.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, at the age of fifty-five, he tried to enlist as a private. In his letter he defends that he is strong and has an audible voice. He was turned down, but he helped with propaganda and with the support of civilian volunteers from the UK. The death of one of his sons, Kingsley, from pneumonia he contracted in the war, made him strengthen his ties with the circles of spiritualism founded by Allan Kardec, a doctrine to which he devoted a lot of time and energy, also publishing in 1926 History of spiritualism and defending it in his numerous polemics, for example, against his own friend Harry Houdini. He also believed and defended the truth of the famous Cottingley Fairies case, although the girls involved admitted many decades later, now old, that the photos actually showed clippings they had taken from their storybooks.

Arthur Conan Doyle's tomb.

He died in Crowborough, East Sussex (England), on July 7, 1930, aged seventy-one, of a heart attack. A statue of him is in that town, where he lived for twenty-three years. He was buried in the Minstead churchyard in the New Forest, Hampshire.

Doyle wrote that his 56 stories and four novels about Sherlock Holmes dwarfed the rest of his body of work: “Twenty to thirty works of fiction, history books on two wars, several titles on paranormal science, three on travel, one on literature, several plays, two books on criminology, two political pamphlets, three collections of poems, a book about childhood and an autobiography."

Works

Sherlock Holmes Stories

• Study in scarlet (A Study in Scarlet, novel, 1887)
• The sign of the four (The Sign of Four, novel, 1890)
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1891-92)
• The Memories of Sherlock Holmes (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1892-93)
• The Baskerville Saturday (The Hound of the Baskervilles, novel, 1901-02)
• The return of Sherlock Holmes (The Return of Sherlock Holmes1903-04)
• His last reverence (His Last Bow1908-17).
• The valley of terror (The Valley of Fear, novel, 1914-15)
• The Sherlock Holmes Archive (The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes1924-26)

The Professor Challenger Novels

George Edward Challenger, Professor Challenger, was the central character in a series of science fiction stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. He first appeared in the novel The Lost World, which describes an expedition to an isolated plateau in South America where prehistoric creatures such as dinosaurs continue to live.

• The lost world (The Lost World1912), 1927. Barcelona, Laertes, 1980.
• The poisoned area (The Poison Belt, 1913), [The circle of death] 1950. Madrid, Debate, 1982.
• The country of the witch (The Land of Mist1926), Madrid 1929. [chuckles]The land of the fogMadrid, Miraguano, 1990.
• When the Earth launched ("When the World Screamed", 1928).
• The disintegrating machine ("The Disintegration Machine", 1929)
  • Adventures of Professor Challenger. Aguilar; Madrid, Valdemar, 2006. Includes The abyss of Maracotwhich is not about Professor Challenger, and omits The land of the fog.

Historical novels

• Micah Clarke (1888)
• The White Company (1891) (The white company, Buenos Aires, Hachette, 1957)
• The Great Shadow (1892)
• The Refugees
• Rodney Stone (1896) (Rodney StoneCaptain Swing Books, 2011)
• Uncle Bernac (1897)
• Natural studies (Strange studies from life and other narratives: The complete true crime writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1901)
• Sir Nigel (1906) (Barcelona, Sopena, n.a.)
• The exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896)
• The adventures of Brigadier Gerard (1903)
• Brigadier's wedding (1910)

Other works