A second novel, The Sign of Four, came out in 1890, and starting in 1891 the Holmes stories regularly appeared in the Strand Magazine. Two collections, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1892 and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in 1893, collected a total of twenty-four of the mysteries. However, Conan Doyle felt that work on the Holmes stories was keeping him from writing on more serious historical topics. To the shock of his readers, in the 1893 story called “The Final Problem” he described the death of his famous sleuth.

In 1894 Conan Doyle published Round the Red Lamp, a collection of short stories with a medical theme; in 1895 The Stark Munro Letters, an autobiographical novel; and in 1896 The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, set in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1900 he traveled to South Africa in the capacity of war-time physician in Cape Town; his treatise on the Boer War, a defense of Britain’s tactics, earned him a knighthood in 1902. That same year Conan Doyle published The Hound of the Baskervilles, set before the story that had finished Holmes off in 1893. In 1903 new Holmes stories started to appear in the Strand.

In the coming years, Conan Doyle produced more popular books on a variety of subjects, including three new collections of stories—The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), His Last Bow (1917), and The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)—plus a final Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear (1915). Among many other non-Holmes projects were the three Challenger novels, historical fiction and nonfiction, and several books on spiritualism. He also championed the rights of the wrongly accused, in two separate cases exonerating innocent men.

With the onset of World War I, Conan Doyle served as a war correspondent on several major European battlefields. Following the war, he became a passionate advocate of spiritualism, which he embraced in part to communicate with his eldest son, Kingsley, who had died from influenza aggravated by war wounds. From 1920 until his death, the author wrote, traveled, and lectured to promote his belief in a spiritual life after the death of the body. After a long, demanding journey through Scandi navia, Arthur Conan Doyle suffered a heart attack; he died a few months later, on July 7, 1930, in Sussex.

THE WORLD OF SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AND SHERLOCK HOLMES

1859 Arthur Conan Doyle is born on May 22 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the second child and eldest son of ten children that will be born to Charles and Mary Foley Doyle. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are published.
1868 Arthur attends school with the Jesuits in England; later he will re- ject Catholicism.
1871 Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass is published. The first book of George Eliot’s Middlemarch is published. Royal Albert Hall, one of Britain’s most important concert venues, opens in London.
1876 Conan Doyle enrolls in the University of Edinburgh Medical School. As a student, he takes various jobs to help his family, including serving as a ship’s doctor on an Arctic voyage. While at Edinburgh, he meets Dr. Joseph Bell, whose analytical capabilities amaze his patients and students; Bell later becomes a model for Sherlock Holmes.
1879 “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,” Conan Doyle’s first story, is pub lished in Chambers’s Journal, an Edinburgh weekly.
1881 Conan Doyle receives his Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery qualifications, and takes a position as ship’s doctor on a steamer en route to West Africa.
1882 He returns to Great Britain and establishes his medical practice.
1885 Conan Doyle receives his M.D. degree. He marries Louise Hawkins; her poor health makes the marriage a difficult one.
1887 A Study in Scarlet, the debut Sherlock Holmes story, is published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual.
1889 Conan Doyle’s short novel The Mystery of Cloomber, which is con cerned with the paranormal, is published, as is Micah Clarke, a popular novel about the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685.
1890 The second Holmes novel, The Sign of Four is published, in Feb ruary in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine and in October as a book. The story had been commissioned at the same dinner party at which Oscar Wilde was offered a contract for The Picture of Do rian Gray, also published in Lippincott’s this year.
1891 The White Company, a tale of fourteenth-century chivalry, is pub lished. Conan Doyle closes his medical practice to devote more time to his writing career. Stories featuring Sherlock Holmes begin to appear regularly in the Strand Magazine.
1892 The story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is pub lished.
1893 The year proves stressful, as the author’s father dies and his wife is diagnosed with tuberculosis. Hoping to help Louise’s condition, the family travels to Switzerland, where Conan Doyle visits Re ichenbach Falls, the site he chooses for the murder of Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem”; he intends for this to be the last Holmes story so that he can turn to literary work he considers more important. He joins the British Society for Psychical Re search, which will provide the basis for his belief in spiritualism. The story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is published.
1894 Round the Red Lamp, a collection of medical short stories, is pub lished.
1895 The Stark Munro Letters, a fictionalized autobiography, is pub lished.
1896 The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, about a hero in the Napoleonic Wars, is published.
1897 Conan Doyle meets Jean Leckie and falls in love with her; the two maintain a platonic relationship until their marriage in 1907. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published.
1900 Conan Doyle travels to South Africa to serve as a hospital doctor in the Boer War; he publishes The Great Boer War, an account of that conflict. Oscar Wilde dies.
1901 Queen Victoria dies.
1902 The Hound of the Baskervilles, a Holmes novel set before “The Final Problem” (1893), is published. Conan Doyle’s work in a field hospital and his treatise on the Boer War, The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, earn him a knighthood.
1903 New Holmes stories begin to appear in the Strand Magazine.
1905 The story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes is published.
1906 Louise dies of tuberculosis at age forty-nine. Conan Doyle begins investigations that will exonerate George Edalji, a man who had been wrongfully accused and sent to jail. Sir Nigel, a companion piece to The White Company (1891), is published.
1907 Conan Doyle marries Jean Leckie.