Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh, and he went on to study medicine. To supplement his income as a doctor, he wrote short stories, published anonymously in a variety of magazines, and wrote a novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887). In this novel, the central character was Sherlock Holmes, based on one of Doyle's teachers, Dr Joseph Bell. Sherlock Holmes soon caught the imagination of the public. There was such an outcry when Conan Doyle tried to kill him off in the Final Problem (1893), that he was obliged to bring Sherlock Holmes back to life eight years later in the Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and to keep him alive for another thirty-five stories.
