His thorough knowledge of both ancient and modern classics is clear from reading the Holmes stories. His parents sent him to Jesuit boarding schools, where he initially rebelled against their harsh discipline, as well as the dullness of his studies. His outlook changed when he discovered the essays of English historian and poet Thomas Macaulay, who died the year Conan Doyle was born. Though hardly anyone reads Macaulay today, he was immensely influential in the nineteenth century. Conan Doyle was entranced by his language and his sharp, colorful pronouncements. Macaulay made history a source of wonder and romance. He was also an unapologetic believer in the superiority of British life. It is not as if there weren’t a thousand springs from which any young British boy could drink in this notion, but Macaulay supplied a river of it to Conan Doyle. He carried a volume of the essays around with him the rest of his life, claiming Macaulay had influenced him more than anyone else.

After graduation from boarding school, it was time to choose a career. Since it appeared that Conan Doyle did not inherit the family’s artistic genes, he decided on a career in medicine. It was at the medical school in Edinburgh that he met the two men who would have the most influence on his conception of Holmes. The first was the surgeon Dr. Joseph Bell; Conan Doyle later claimed he was the model for Sherlock Holmes. Bell regularly amazed his students by deducing facts about his patients from minute observations of their appearance and behavior. Conan Doyle’s autobiography, Memories and Adventures (see “For Further Reading”), lists only one example of the doctor’s deductive powers.

In one of his best cases he said to a civilian patient: ‘Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.’ ‘Aye, Sir.’ ‘Not long discharged?’ ‘No, Sir.’ ‘A Highland regiment?’ ‘Aye, Sir.’ ‘A non-com officer?’ ‘Aye, Sir.’ ‘Stationed at Barbados?’ ‘Aye, Sir.’ ‘You see, gentlemen,’ he would explain, ‘the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is Elephantiasis, which is West Indian, and not British’ (p. 330).

That could well be Sherlock Holmes interrogating a visitor to 221B Baker Street. Bell’s reasoning powers made so strong an impression on Conan Doyle that he turned to those memories when he decided to write a detective novel. When the first twelve stories were published in book form as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle asked Bell if he might dedicate them to him. Robert Louis Stevenson, who also knew Bell, wrote to congratulate Conan Doyle on “your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” At the end of the letter Stevenson asks, “Only one thing troubles me: can this be my old friend Joe Bell?”

Dr. Bell wasn’t the only model, though. Some aspects of Holmes were derived from George Budd, a fellow medical student Conan Doyle met on the school’s rugby team. Brilliant but mercurial, Budd could talk expansively on subject after subject, then lapse into moody silence. The life of the party at one moment, he could turn murderously violent the next. The two were friends at medical school, but they lost track of one another when Budd moved away after graduation in 1881. In 1882, after Conan Doyle had spent some postgraduate time at sea, Budd summoned him to Plymouth, England, to start a practice there.

Budd had made a tremendous success of his practice by flouting every rule of medical etiquette. He yelled at his patients, pushed some against walls, cursed others, told many they ate too much, drank too much, and slept too much. Sometimes Budd refused even to see them, proclaiming to an anxious clutch in the waiting room that he was going to spend the day in the country.