Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh and studied medicine at the university there. He combined a career as a doctor with writing, but he is best known for creating the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who first appeared in A Study in Scarlet in 1887, and went on to feature in three further novels and fifty-six short stories. Conan Doyle died in 1930, at the age of seventy-one.