The Sign of the Four

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Though raised Catholic and educated at a Jesuit school, he declared himself agnostic as an adult, earning the ire of his wealthy extended family (Klinger, Leslie S. “The World of Sherlock Holmes.” The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol 1. Norton: 2005, xxii).

Doyle attended medical school and trained as a physician. In 1882, he set up his own practice and soon married his first wife, Louise Hawkins, with whom he had two children. In 1897, Louise was diagnosed with tuberculosis and began to deteriorate. During this time, Doyle met and fell in love with Jean Leckie, though he maintained a platonic relationship with her out of respect for his wife (Klinger, xxxiii). When Louise died in 1906, he married Jean and had three more children with her. They lived together in Sussex until Doyle’s death by heart attack in 1930.

Doyle is most celebrated for creating Sherlock Holmes. He first devised the character around 1886, inspired by the famous Dr. Joseph Bell, with whom Doyle had studied at University of Edinburgh (Klinger, xxiii). The first Sherlock Holmes story, the novel A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887, followed by The Sign of Four in 1890.