Arthur Conan Doyle Wrote More Than Just Sherlock Holmes

The creator of the world's first consulting detective enjoyed great success with that character. So successful that Arthur Conan Doyle was dwarfed by his creation, Sherlock Holmes.

Actually, Doyle wrote extensively on many other topics and even created another very successful character, the temperamental and adventurous Professor Edward Challenger, featured in a number of popular stories, not the least of which is a novel that is a perennial favorite, The Lost World.

Doyle wrote the first Holmes story in 1887 and continued adding to his canon until his death in 1930. In all, there would be 56 short stories and four full-length novels.

Holmes and Watson first met in A Study in Scarlet, which appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. To the underemployed doctor's surprise, Holmes was a hit. A few years later, the next Holmes story appeared in the maiden year of the new The Strand magazine. A Scandal in Bohemia featuring "that" woman, Irene Adler, appeared in the July issue. Most of Doyle's subsequent Holmes stories would continue to appear in The Strand. The magazine itself was published from January 1891 until January 1891 (it is now in revival at newsstands).

In Doyle's own time, Holmes became an icon as well as the model for a number literary knock-offs. Only the original resident of 221B Baker Street, London, has really survived.

Holmes has further inserted himself into our consciousness through film.

One of the four novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles, has been filmed numerous times for movies and television, with Holmes portrayed by such actors as Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Peter Cushing, Ian Richardson, Tom Baker, Peter Cook, Stewart Granger and Matt Frewer. Doyle was still alive when the first version of The Hound of the Baskervilles was released, a 1921 silent. Acutally, there had been a number of silent movies before that and many since. The Internet Movie Database lists 221 Sherlock Holmes movies and TV productions.

And there have been literally thousands of Holmes short stories, novels, and other literary "pastiches" issued over the years. One of the latest is The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collecting original stories by an assortment of writers including Stephen King. Professor Challenger made his foray into the paleolithic world atop a South American tepui in The Lost World, which appeared in may-November 1912 issues of The Strand.

His prolific output included more stories featuring Challenger and the journalist Malone, as well as books on spiritualism, an issue that became of increasing interest to him after his the deaths of family members over the years. Among those titles are The History of Spiritualism, The New Revelations, Coming of the Fairies, The Case for Spirit Photorgraphy,The Vital Message. and, published the year of his death, The Edge of the Unknown. In fact, the last Challenger story has the professor sending out Malone to prove that there is life after death, and Malone succeeds.

Doyle wrote on a variety of topics, including historical novels, as well as on wars and disasters. His knighthood was for a literary defense of the government's prosecution of the Boer War in South Africa. He also wrote a nonfiction articles for the British Medical Journal and The Lancet, as well as Cornhills Magazine.

Oddly, to the extent that Doyle shared some of Holmes' deductive abilities, he is regarded as rather credulous when it came to spiritual matters.

Doyle insisted in The Edge of the Unknown that his one-time friend, Harry Houdini, perpetrated his illusions with actual psychic talent, no doubt somewhat to Houdini's consternation. He was also famously hoaxed by a couple of young girls who mounted cut-outs of fairies from a child's book onto stiff wire so that they extended beyond their background, and produced pictures of them. The ladies eventually admitted the fraud decades later. He's also been linked to the Piltdown Man hoax, although his role remains unclear.

Arthur Conan Doyle, it turns out, was quite a prolific writer, although today he may be remembered only for Sherlock Holmes, and occasionally for Professor Challenger's dinosaurs. Not a bad record, actually.