The Many Lives of Arthur Conan Doyle

What to do when your medical practice doesn't have enough patients? You could sail the world, campaign on behalf of psychics, run for a seat in Parliament... and, of course, pioneer the mystery genre.

Photograph of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Walter Benington ca. 1914. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Arthur Conan Doyle was in a serious pickle.

He had done everything right! He dutifully completed his education, received several medical degrees from the University of Edinburgh, studied botany at the Royal Botanic Garden, and gained experience as a doctor aboard two different ships. At the tender age of twenty-three, he had traveled the world, published a short story, and finally settled in Portsmouth to open a private practice.¹

There was just one problem: doctors need patients, and Doyle hardly had any.

The young Arthur couldn’t fail now. He had known the turbulence of poverty as a child, and his inability to establish a private practice could not stand in the way of the bright future that surely belonged to him. Doyle² returned to his writing, pushed past numerous rejections, and at the age of twenty-seven, he invented the most famous detective in the world.

Along the way, he launched (and lost) p…