59 Fun Facts About Arthur Conan Doyle

In which city was Arthur Conan Doyle born in 1859?

A statue of Sherlock Holmes now stands in Picardy Place, close to the house where he was born.

What was Doyle's profession before he became a full-time writer?

He studied medicine at university and later completed an M.D. with a dissertation on tabes dorsalis.

According to his baptism record, how was 'Conan' recorded?

'Conan' was a given name after his godfather Michael Conan; he began using it as a sort of surname after school.

Why was the Doyle family split up and housed with different families in 1864?

Charles Altamont Doyle died in 1893 in the Crichton Royal asylum after years of psychiatric illness.

Which Jesuit school in Lancashire did Doyle attend until 1875?

He remembered it as harsh and 'run on medieval principles', then spent a year at Stella Matutina in Austria.

On what kind of vessel did Doyle serve as ship's doctor in 1880?

The Hope of Peterhead met the Eira expedition that went on to name Cape Flora and other features of Franz Josef Land.

Which real maritime mystery did Doyle's 'J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement' popularise, with invented details that stuck?

His spelling 'Marie Celeste' and his claim that the boats were still aboard are still repeated as fact.

In which town did Doyle set up an unsuccessful medical practice in 1882, arriving with less than £10?

Waiting for patients who never came, he went back to writing fiction.

Which medical specialism did Doyle try, and fail, to master in Vienna in 1891?

He could not follow the German terms in lectures, went ice skating instead, and later had no patients at all in Wimpole Street.

How long did it take Doyle to write A Study in Scarlet?

He was 27 and sold all rights for a pittance; it appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887.

How much did Ward Lock pay Doyle for all rights to A Study in Scarlet?

Feeling exploited, he left Ward Lock after The Sign of the Four and took Holmes to the Strand.

Which of Doyle's university teachers was the chief model for Sherlock Holmes?

Robert Louis Stevenson spotted it at once, writing 'can this be my old friend Joe Bell?'.

Dr Watson owes his surname to whom?

Dr James Watson lent nothing else to the character but the name.

Where did the monthly Sherlock Holmes short stories appear from 1891, making Doyle one of the best-paid writers?

'A Scandal in Bohemia' was the first of twenty-four; he wrote the first five from his empty consulting room in Devonshire Place.

How did Doyle's mother reply when he wrote in 1891 that he was thinking of 'slaying Holmes'?

He tried to price publishers out instead, but they paid whatever he asked.

At which Swiss waterfall did Doyle send Holmes and Moriarty to their apparent deaths?

The nearby town of Meiringen still celebrates the connection.

Public outcry brought Holmes back in which 1901 novel?

'The Adventure of the Empty House' in 1903 explained that only Moriarty had gone over the edge.

How many Sherlock Holmes short stories did Doyle write in total?

Plus four novels; the last story appeared in 1927, three years before his death.

Which irascible scientist did Doyle create for The Lost World in 1912?

The book gave its name to a whole subgenre of speculative fiction; Challenger later returned in the spiritualist novel The Land of Mist.

Doyle's humorous stories about a Napoleonic soldier feature which character?

He also wrote seven historical novels including The White Company, which he and many critics rated above the Holmes stories.

Under what pseudonym did Doyle play in goal for an amateur football club?

He was also an amateur boxer, a keen golfer and a billiards competitor.

Doyle's single first-class cricket wicket for the MCC was which legendary batsman?

He was so pleased he wrote a poem about it; his highest score was 43.

Which cricket side, captained by Doyle, also included the creators of Peter Pan, Jeeves and Winnie-the-Pooh?

His scores in its matches were by far the commonest entries in his diary.

In 1901 Doyle judged Eugen Sandow's world-first major competition in which sport?

It was held at the Royal Albert Hall; the sculptor Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge and Sandow himself were the other judges.

Doyle was invited in 1909 to referee which heavyweight championship fight in Reno, Nevada?

His friends pictured him ending up 'with a revolver at one ear and a razor at the other'; distance and engagements stopped him.

Doyle's 1894 magazine article 'An Alpine Pass on Ski' is credited with popularising what?

Skiing was then almost unknown in Switzerland; the article began the country's long association with the sport.

What was the name of Doyle's first wife, whom he married in 1885 and who suffered from tuberculosis?

He met Jean Leckie in 1897 but kept the relationship platonic until Louisa's death in 1906, marrying Jean the next year.

How many living direct descendants does Doyle have?

None of his five children had children of their own.

During which war did Doyle serve as a volunteer doctor at a field hospital in Bloemfontein?

His pamphlet defending Britain's conduct there was, he believed, the reason he was knighted in 1902.

Which monarch knighted Doyle in the 1902 Coronation Honours?

He received the accolade in person at Buckingham Palace on 24 October 1902 and was gazetted simply as Doyle.

For which party did Doyle twice stand unsuccessfully for Parliament?

He lost in his native city in 1900 and in the Hawick Burghs in 1906.

Doyle's 1909 pamphlet The Crime of the Congo backed a reform campaign led by journalist E. D. Morel and which diplomat?

After the Easter Rising Doyle tried, unsuccessfully, to save Casement from execution by arguing he had been driven mad.

Which wrongly convicted solicitor of Parsi heritage did Doyle help clear in 1906?

Julian Barnes fictionalised the story in Arthur & George, filmed by ITV with Martin Clunes as Doyle.

Doyle paid most of the costs of whose successful 1928 appeal against a Glasgow murder conviction?

Slater, a German-born Jew who ran a gambling den, had been convicted in 1908 of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman.

In which year did Arthur Conan Doyle publicly declare himself a spiritualist in a letter to the journal Light?

He was initiated as a Freemason in the same town that year, and formally began preaching spiritualism as a 'New Revelation' in 1916.

Whose psychic abilities strengthened Doyle's spiritualist faith in 1916?

Kingsley died of pneumonia in 1918 after being wounded on the Somme, but Doyle was already publicly a spiritualist.

Doyle's 1922 book The Coming of the Fairies defended which later-admitted hoax?

Cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright eventually confessed, though both insisted they really had seen fairies.

Which American magician fell out publicly with Doyle after Doyle insisted his tricks were supernatural?

Doyle said as much in The Edge of the Unknown; Houdini spent the 1920s exposing fraudulent mediums.

When a psychical researcher exposed a 'spirit photographer' as a fraud in 1922, how did Doyle react?

He then led 84 members out of the Society for Psychical Research in protest at its hostility to spiritualism.

Which sceptic debated Doyle on spiritualism at Queen's Hall in 1920, then published a booklet saying he was duped?

McCabe argued Doyle had been duped by deliberate mediumship trickery.

Which 1912 scientific hoax has Doyle been accused of, though 2016 DNA evidence pointed to Charles Dawson?

Doyle golfed at Piltdown and once gave Dawson a lift there, which the historian Richard Milner found suspicious.

What was the name of the Surrey house near Hindhead that Doyle helped design and lived in from 1897 to 1907?

He founded a rifle club there in 1900; the house was saved from redevelopment by a 2012 High Court ruling.

Under what name did the Crimes Club, founded by Doyle in 1903, become known?

The society caps membership at 100, meets four times a year in Russell Square, and uses Doyle's silhouette as its logo.

What were Doyle's last words, addressed to his wife?

He died of a heart attack at Windlesham Manor in Crowborough on 7 July 1930, aged 71.

Where was Doyle finally reinterred alongside his wife?

He was first buried in the rose garden at Windlesham because, as a spiritualist, he was not considered a Christian.

What are the first four words of the epitaph on Doyle's gravestone?

It continues with his name, the word 'Knight', and a line calling him patriot and man of letters.

How much a year did Doyle leave in his will to Alfred Wood, his private secretary since 1897?

By comparison he had paid £500 of the £600 cost of a spiritualist temple in Camden in 1926.

Doyle's first academic article, in the British Medical Journal in 1879, studied which substance as a poison?

He had dosed himself to test it; The Daily Telegraph later thought the paper useful in a 21st-century murder inquiry.

Which fellow author collaborated with Doyle in 1893 on the libretto of the comic opera Jane Annie?

Doyle also wrote the play Waterloo for Henry Irving and a stage version of 'The Speckled Band'.

Doyle's brother-in-law E. W. Hornung created which gentleman-thief character?

Hornung, two nephews and Doyle's brother Innes all died in the years just after the First World War.

On a 1914 family trip to Jasper National Park in Canada, what did Doyle design for a hotel?

The plans were built in full but nothing survives; he also redesigned the Lyndhurst Grand Hotel's facade in 1912.

What was the name of Doyle's second wife, with whom he moved to Sussex in 1907?

They had three children together, including Adrian, who became a keeper of his father's literary estate.

In which Sussex town, where a statue honours him, did Doyle spend his last 23 years?

He was elected captain of the town's Beacon Golf Club for 1910 and died at Windlesham Manor there in 1930.

In 2009 Doyle was one of ten people chosen by the Royal Mail for which commemorative stamp series?

Edinburgh's Picardy Place, near his birthplace, has a statue not of Doyle but of Sherlock Holmes.

What prompted Doyle to build a 100-yard range and found a rifle club at his home in 1900?

He became a champion of 'miniature' rifle clubs so that ordinary men could train in marksmanship.

From 1902 Doyle served as a Deputy-Lieutenant of which English county?

The following year he was made a Knight of Grace of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem.

The Sign of the Four, the second Holmes novel, first appeared in February 1890 in which magazine?

Feeling exploited by Ward Lock, Doyle left the publisher after this and took the short stories elsewhere.

Doyle wrote the play Waterloo, about a Napoleonic War veteran, for which celebrated actor?

His other stage works included The House of Temperley, built around his abiding interest in boxing.

Doyle spent 1875–76 perfecting his German at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in which country?

The school was in Feldkirch; he had been raised Catholic but became an agnostic as a young adult.