Arthur Conan Doyle

Born Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle on May 22, 1859, at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, to an English Catholic architect and illustrator who would die in an asylum after years of alcoholism, and an Irish Catholic mother who told her son the old French tales of chivalry, he was sent away at nine to Stonyhurst, a Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire. He hated the floggings and lost his faith. At Edinburgh Medical School he studied under the surgeon Joseph Bell, whose habit of diagnosing patients from their boots and accents would later be transferred to a consulting detective in Baker Street. Doyle served as ship's surgeon on a Greenland whaler and a West African steamer, set up an unsuccessful general practice in Portsmouth, and wrote stories in the empty waiting room. A Study in Scarlet (1887) introduced Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson and earned him twenty-five pounds outright. The Strand serial that followed made him, by the 1890s, the highest-paid author in Britain. He killed Holmes off at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893, was hounded by readers for a decade, and resurrected him in 1901 with The Hound of the Baskervilles. He was knighted in 1902 for a pamphlet defending British conduct in the Boer War. After his eldest son died of wounds from the Somme, he turned to spiritualism, defended the Cottingley fairy photographs as genuine, and broke with his friend Houdini over the matter. He died of a heart attack at Windlesham Manor on July 7, 1930, at seventy-one, his last words directed to his second wife: you are wonderful.

In March 1901, a golfing holiday in Norfolk was rained off. Over dinner at Cromer Hall, his host told the story of a Devon ancestor, Richard Cabell, said to have been torn apart by a spectral hound. Doyle's friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson supplied the Dartmoor detail. Doyle went home and wrote the case that revived Sherlock Holmes.