Arthur Conan Doyle

Born in Edinburgh in 1859, Doyle studied medicine and worked as a ship's doctor before opening a failing practice in Portsmouth, writing stories on the side. A Study in Scarlet introduced Sherlock Holmes in 1887, but it was the monthly stories in The Strand Magazine starting in 1891 that turned him into one of the highest-paid authors in Britain. Frustrated by the character's shadow over his other work, he killed Holmes in 1893; reader fury forced a resurrection in 1901's The Hound of the Baskervilles, and he wrote Holmes stories until 1927. Knighted in 1902, he spent his later years on political causes, criminal justice cases that helped establish England's appeals court, and - after family deaths - an increasingly public devotion to spiritualism that cost him his friendship with Houdini. He died in 1930, having written over 200 stories, but the consulting detective outlasted everything.