May 22, 1859: It's Elementary, My Dear Reader

1859: Arthur Conan Doyle is born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He’ll go on to create the most famous detective in fiction: Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle became a medical doctor, a vocation that didn’t become his destiny but led him to it. He impatiently filled the many patient-less hours of a struggling practice, creating a character who […]

1859: sherlock Arthur Conan Doyle is born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He'll go on to create the most famous detective in fiction: Sherlock Holmes.

Conan Doyle became a medical doctor, a vocation that didn't become his destiny but led him to it. He impatiently filled the many patient-less hours of a struggling practice, creating a character who became the archetypal protagonist of crime fiction. He was also sowing the seeds for generations to come of eccentric, cerebral detectives whose crime-solving technique was light on physical prowess and heavy on the powers of observation and deduction.

Sherlock Holmes was perhaps an alter ego but without a doubt an homage to one of Conan Doyle's teachers in medical school. Holmes combined uncanny skills of observation and the canny application of science and mental precision — traits that led in a straight line to a certain master logician from the planet Vulcan, who even coyly claimed Conan Doyle/Holmes as an ancestor.

"Elementary, my dear Watson" remains one of the most memorable lines in modern literature. While it entered the lexicon as part of the Holmes canon, it was not a line written by Conan Doyle himself. The phrase first appeared in one of the popular Sherlock Holmes films of the 1940s, which brought a new lease on life to the detective who lived at 221b Baker Street, London.

The Holmes legend remains so powerful that tourists still go to a nearby London address cast as 221b, a museum at an imaginary domicile for a fictional character.

And, when polled two years ago, Britons decided that their favorite joke was a Sherlock Holmes joke. Holmes and Watson are camping out, and the detective asks his companion lying at his side what he sees. Watson describes the night sky in great detail. "Watson, you idiot," interjects Holmes, "we had a tent!"

Enormously popular in the 56 short stories and four novels, Sherlock Holmes has been the central character in dozens of stories and novels and films by other writers, and he's still current. The BBC did a series in the 1990s starring Jeremy Brett as our hero, and British director Guy Ritchie released a Sherlock Holmes movie on Christmas Day in 2009. It features a scruffy, sardonic, swashbuckling, bowler-wearing Robert Downey, Jr. in the title role — a long way from an asexual Basil Rathbone with his calabash pipe, magnifying glass and inexplicable deerstalker cap.

Conan Doyle also popularized the archenemy dynamic in the form of evil Professor Moriarity — half of the key duality of every pulp novel and comic book ever written. And by killing off Holmes, with whom he had grown weary, Conan Doyle introduced the questionable literary device of resurrecting from the dead a popular character after fans roundly object to his untimely demise. It isn't much of a slippery slide from Reichenbach Falls to Bobby Ewing's death just being a bad dream, erasing an entire season of Dallas.

Not bad for a kid whose father was said to be a notorious drunk and the only member of a family to accomplish nothing of note.

Conan Doyle was sent to a Jesuit prep school at age 8 and attended the Jesuit-run Stonyhurst College, but he would reject religion and become an agnostic as an adult and then, late in life, something of a spiritualist.

He began studying medicine at age 17 at the University of Edinburgh, served as a ship's doctor for a while and earned his degree in 1885. He set up a medical practice in Portsmouth in 1882, but it was not initially successful. Conan Doyle began to write fiction during his studies, but whiling away the hours at his lackluster practice gave him the time and the reason to pursue it.

In 1887 Conan Doyle published "A Letter Study in Scarlet," in which Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance — as a relatively minor character. Holmes was based in large part on Conan Doyle's former university professor, Joseph Bell, to whom Conan Doyle wrote: "It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes ... round the center of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man." So strong was the resemblance that contemporary Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to Conan Doyle saying he recognized his friend in the character of the London detective.

But Conan Doyle became torn. He continued to practice medicine — by the 1890s he was an ophthalmologist — but he wrote his mother that Holmes was taking over his life, that he preferred concentrating on his historical novels, and that "I think of slaying Holmes ... and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things." His mother advised that the public would be outraged if he did so. Mom was right: When he did so, they were.

Conan Doyle supported Britain's actions in the globally reviled Boer War, an action he credited with his receiving a knighthood. But he also was an outspoken proponent of reform in the Congo, at a time when it was beset with atrocities. He personally investigated — Holmesian indeed — two closed cases, garnering exonerations for two convicted men.

In his later years, wracked by depression that began with the loss of a son, a brother and four other relatives in World War I, Conan Doyle turned to spiritualism, and a belief that he could communicate with the dead.

He and his wife took their three children on several "psychic crusades" to the United States, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Australia and Africa, burning through 250,000 pounds (about $15 million in today's money) along the way. He needed to write to raise money, and turned out a number of psychic-themed stories.

Conan Doyle died on July 7, 1930, surrounded by his family. His official biography says his last words before departing for "the greatest and most glorious adventure of all," were to his wife.

He whispered, "You are wonderful."

Source: Various

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