Arthur Conan Doyle
（1859—1930）

Arthur Conan Doyle was most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, the best-known detective in literature. Doyle was born in Edinburgh, whose parents were Roman Catholics. From 1876 to 1881 he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School. In 1882, he set up a medical practice in Southsea. The practice was initially not very successful; while waiting for patients, he wrote stories. He joined the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society in 1883 and seven years later he gave up his medical practice in favor of writing. He was knighted in 1902. From 1914, he turned to believe in Spiritualism, after his son's death in WWI. Arthur Conan Doyle married twice, and died in England after a heart attack.

His first significant work was A Study in Scarlet, which appeared in 1887 and featured the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is renowned for his skillful use of “deductive reasoning”to solve difficult cases. Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories that featured Holmes. All but four stories are narrated by Holmes's friend and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson; two are narrated by Sherlock Holmes himself, and two others are written in the third person. Besides Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle also wrote a number of books on other subjects, including The Great Boer War (1900), The Lost World (1912), The New Revelation (1918), and The History of Spiritualism (1926).