Scottish writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a founding father of the detective genre and is best known for creating the indelible character of Sherlock Holmes. Although Doyle's parents were poor, a wealthy uncle supported his education and he graduated with a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh and showed promise as a writer of short stories. In the ensuing years, Doyle worked as a ship's doctor before setting up his own practice in Portsmouth. Without many patients at first, he had time to dedicate to writing, and published his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, in 1886. The story was received well and another Holmes book, The Sign of the Four, was commissioned. Over the course of his lifetime Doyle would publish fifty-six Sherlock Holmes short stories (later collected into five anthologies) and four novels, and was knighted in 1902 for his contributions to English literature. The Sherlock Holmes canon has remained popular since its original publication and has been adapted numerous times, most recently in the Sherlock Holmes films starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, as well as the BBC television series Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on July 7, 1930, at the age of 71 from a heart attack.
