Name This Famous Person Game

By Mike McLeod

Whose famous face is this? Elementary, my dear reader. It belongs to none other than the creator of the resident of 221-B Baker Street. Surely, you must know that the world-famous detective Sherlock Holmes is ensconced there, thanks to the imagination of that intrepid writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

What you may not know is Arthur Conan Doyle rather personifies two of his famous characters, Holmes and Dr. Watson. You see, Arthur Conan Doyle trained as a medical doctor, just like Dr. Watson. Doyle also had some of Holmes’ gift for observation—he personally solved two cases that had been closed by the police after they convicted the wrong people. It was Doyle’s attention to details in the cases published in newspapers that exonerated these two hapless victims of blind justice.

It was while he was in medical school that Doyle met Dr. Joseph Bell whose powers of observation and deduction were legendary among the students. It was he who was the role model for the character of Sherlock Holmes. As a side note, Robert Louis Stevenson was a classmate of Doyle’s at medical school.

Holmes’ first appeared in print in 1887 in A Study In Scarlett in Beeton's Christmas Annual. Since then, the detective has solved crimes in four novels, 56 short stories, and nearly 300 movies and TV shows. He is the most portrayed character in movies with more than 70 actors playing the astute detective. Robert Downey, Jr., recently joined the list, and his Sherlock Holmes 2009 movie grossed $209 million in the U.S. and $476 million worldwide. Sherlock Holmes 2, a sequel, has been announced and will debut in December 2011.

But enough about him. The real star is Doyle. Born on May 22, 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary Foley, Doyle was one of ten children. He would write later of what a wonderful storyteller his mother was, which obviously rubbed off on him.

As mentioned earlier, Doyle trained to become a physician, but he was not destined to become well known as one. His practices with a partner and on his own were not successful. He later studied to become an ophthalmologist and received his degree to practice. But after opening his business, not one client came through the door. Oh, well, not to worry. This gave Doyle plenty of time for writing his stories—and not just about that Holmes character. Doyle authored a novel called The Lost World whose main character was a Professor Challenger. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It has to do with dinosaurs and jungles. Doyle put all that free time to good use. During his lifetime, he wrote six novels about Professor Challenger, 12 plays, 12 pamphlets, 43 works of fiction, and 40 works on war, the army and spiritualism.

Many have been amazed or confounded that Doyle, whose life was logic, was such an ardent believer in spiritualism. Doyle lost many close to him during his life, including his first wife Louisa Hawkins, a son, a brother, two brothers-in-law and two nephews. It seems his loss of loved ones motivated him to find evidence of an afterlife. As another side note, Doyle was friends with Harry Houdini who conducted his own investigations into spiritualism and revealed many frauds.

Despite all of his novels and works of fiction, it was a nonfiction pamphlet that won Doyle the honor of becoming knighted. In 1899, the Boer War began in South Africa with the government there and the European settlers fighting against the British for control of the mining and farming. Doyle served as a doctor to the troops in this war, which lasted for three years. Afterwards, the British were charged with war crimes (concentration camps and torture). The government did not officially respond to these charges, so Doyle wrote a 60,000-word pamphlet in eight days, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct, to dispel the accusations, which it did. For this, he was knighted by King Henry VII.

In one thing, though, Doyle did make a grave error: his decision to end the life of Sherlock Holmes to have more time to write other novels. As you may remember, Holmes—while in hand-to-hand battle with his nemesis, the evil Dr. Moriarty—plunged to his death, along with the bad doctor, over Reichenbach Falls. However, the public was not amused. In fact, the outcry caused Doyle to resurrect the detective to solve crimes again.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on July 7, 1930 in Sussex, England, but for his fans, the game is still afoot.