English literature at the end of the 19

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a British writer, who created Sherlock Holmes, the world's best known detective. Millions of readers are delighted in his ability to solve crimes by an amazing use of reason and observation.

Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was a doctor and began practicing medicine in 1882, but his practice was not suc­cessful. Sherlock Holmes came into being while the young doctor waited vainly for patients. Doyle amused himself during those long hours by writing stories about a "scientific" detective who solved cases by his amusing power of deduction. His early stories were not very popular, but he won great success with his first Holmes novel "A Study in Scarlet" (1887).

The author modeled Holmes on a real person, a tall, wiry sur­geon who had the reputation of being able to tell a person's occu­pation just by looking at him. Holmes appeared in 56 short stories, written by Doyle, and three other novels: "The Sign of Four" (1890), "The Hound of the Baskervilles"(1902), and "The Valley of Fear" (1915). Later, growing tired of writing Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a story in which the detective was killed by the Professor Mariarty mentioned at the beginning of "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder". But Holmes was so popular that public demand forced the author to bring him back to life in "The Return of Sherlock Holmes"

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote historical novels, romances, and plays. At last he left fiction to study and lecture on spiritual­ism (communication with spirits).