Doyle, Arthur Conan

Scottish writer. He created the detective Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr Watson, who first appeared in A Study in Scarlet (1887) and featured in a number of subsequent stories, including The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). Among Doyle's other works is the fantasy adventure The Lost World (1912). In his later years he became a spiritualist and wrote a History of Spiritualism (1926).

Doyle was born in Edinburgh, qualified as a physician, and from 1882 to 1890 practised in Southsea. During the second South African War (or Boer War) he was senior physician of a field hospital. His The Great Boer War was published in 1900 and an influential pamphlet justifying the conflict, ‘The War in South Africa’, appeared in 1902. Doyle was knighted in 1902.