Arthur Conan Doyle

Doyle qualified as a doctor in Edinburgh, sailed as ship's surgeon on an Arctic whaler at twenty, and then set up a practice in Southsea where patients were so scarce that he wrote to fill the hours. He built his detective on a teacher: Joseph Bell, the Edinburgh surgeon who diagnosed strangers from their boots and their accents before they had spoken.

He came to resent the character. In 1893 he pushed Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls, and the public reaction — cancelled subscriptions, mourning bands, letters of abuse — eventually forced the resurrection. He would have preferred to be remembered for his historical novels, and nobody agreed.

He was a formidable investigator in his own right. His campaign for George Edalji, wrongly convicted of maiming livestock, contributed to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907, and he fought for years to overturn Oscar Slater's conviction for murder.

He was also, after the deaths of his son and his brother, a convinced spiritualist who defended the Cottingley Fairies — photographs later admitted by the two girls who made them to be cut-outs held up with hatpins. The man who invented the great rationalist could not always be one.