Born Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle in Edinburgh, Scotland, the third of ten children in an Irish Catholic family. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he encountered Dr Joseph Bell, whose remarkable powers of observation and deduction would become the primary model for Sherlock Holmes. He practiced as a physician before the success of his writing allowed him to abandon medicine entirely.

ppointed Knight Bachelor in the Coronation Honours of Edward VII, the award recognising his pamphlet The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, in which he defended British military conduct during the Boer War to an international audience. Doyle had initially declined the honour twice before accepting, uncomfortable with the establishment recognition it represented. The knighthood was awarded for his political and journalistic work rather than his fiction, a distinction Doyle noted with characteristic ambivalence given that Sherlock Holmes had by this point made him the most recognisable British author in the world.

Died of a heart attack at his home Windlesham Manor in Crowborough, Sussex, aged 71. By the time of his death Doyle had published four Sherlock Holmes novels and fifty-six short stories spanning four decades, as well as historical novels, science fiction, and a substantial body of work on spiritualism, to which he had devoted much of his later life. He was buried in the garden of Windlesham Manor before being reinterred at All Saints' Churchyard in Minstead, Hampshire.