Home › Conan Doyle › Conan Doyle (SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE) (II)

Conan Doyle (SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE) (II)

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE was known everywhere and to everybody as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He once said that he wished America might have taken a little less eagerly to the detective tales and evidenced an equal enthusiasm for his historical romances, which he regarded as his best work. He remarked that he had spent two years of hard work and had consulted more than two hundred books in composing "The White Company."

The numerous Sherlock Holmes tales and the historical romances show but two sides to the author's unusual versatility. He always kept up his keen interest in medicine, his first profession. In "The Crime of the Congo" he wrote about the cruelties of King Leopold's administration of the Congo rubber traffic. In South Africa, and more recently in France, he studied and wrote about modern war. Long before the great war overwhelmed Europe he saw the storm-cloud gathering and in short stories he forecast some of the terrors and marvels of war as it might be and as it proved to be. In "Great Britain and the Next War," in 1913, he exposed the specious arguments of General Bernhardi. For many years he was investigating spiritualism, starting as a convinced unbeliever. More and more he was won over to complete faith in communications from the spirit world, and in numerous articles and "The New Revelation" (1918) he set down the story of his progress from skepticism to belief.