On May 22, 1859, the game was afoot. The author of the series of stories about Professor Challenger and Brigadier Gerard was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. The family was poor, but the author was supported by wealthy uncles and sent to private school at the age of nine. Then he attended Stonyhurst College, which had an unusual curriculum that included nothing but rhetoric, geometry, algebra, and classic literature. They called it their “medieval principal,” and our subject did not enjoy it. When he was about 16, his family (probably the uncles) thought it would be good for him to broaden his academic experience and, by the way, learn German, so he went to the Stella Matutina school in Austria.
After his broadening experience, he returned to his home town to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Around that time he began writing short stories, and published his first one (The Mystery of Sasassa Valley) in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in 1879. That same year he published his first academic article as well, Gelsemium as a Poison. It was published in the British Medical Journal, and the Daily Telegraph newspaper speculated that the article could be useful in some future murder investigation.
Our guy did a bit of traveling in 1880, when he was the ship’s doctor aboard a whaling vessel, then on another ship on a voyage to West Africa. When he returned, he tried to open a medical practice in Plymouth, England, and then another in Southsea, but attracting new patients proved difficult. That left him with plenty of time on his hands, which he filled by writing more stories. He finally gave up his medical practice and in 1891, went to Vienna to study ophthalmology. Although he could speak German (remember that Austrian school), he found the German medical terms very difficult to understand, and after a while gave up.
He had, however, learned enough to open an ophthalmology practice in London. That didn’t work out either, and he later reported in his autobiography that he never had a single patient. But don’t fret; he’d kept writing stories the whole time, and had published one in Beeton’s Christmas Annual to good reviews. He wrote a sequel, and published it in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890. The characters and setting caught on, along with his plots, and he published several more in Strand Magazine.
Our friend the doctor, though, didn’t really think that much of his own work as a writer. He wrote to his mother in 1891 that he was thinking of killing off his main character so he wouldn’t have to write any more stories about him. His mother, who enjoyed the stories, replied “You won’t! You can’t! You mustn’t!” So he thought he’d just try to price himself out of the market, and told his publishers he was raising the prices of his stories to unheard-of levels. To his possible consternation, they simply said “ok, no problem,” and he became the best-paid author of the time.
He really did kill off his main character in 1893, but there was a huge (worldwide) public outcry, and he brought the character back — this time in a novel, in 1901. Another story in 1903 explained that the character hadn’t actually died; it was a ploy to mislead his enemies. Our author kept writing that story series until 1927, and ended up with 56 of them. He also wrote 16 other novels, including historical novels and five Professor Challenger books (surprise, that main character I mentioned was not Professor Challenger).
By now you’ve probably figured out that we’re talking about Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. It was elementary. The only remaining mystery is about his name. Although he’s sometimes referred to as “Sir Conan Doyle,” Conan is his middle name. In fact just one of his two middle names. In real life, the author who would rather have been a doctor was Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle.
