Author. He was a Scottish author who was the creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who has become one of the most famous fictional characters of all time. Born in Edinburgh, he was one of eight siblings of an alcoholic Roman Catholic father, causing him to spend his childhood living in various households without his parents or with his parents in squalid tenement flats. After studying in Austria, he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School and began to practice medicine in 1882, but without much success. He was a staunch supporter of compulsory vaccination and was published on the subject. While waiting for patients, he started writing short stories as a hobby, but his early writings earned him only pocket money. His first great success came with his first Sherlock Holmes novel, "A Study in Scarlet" in 1887. In Holmes, Doyle created a detective who used observation and logic to solve crimes, which Doyle had patterned after a real-life Scotland Yard detective. For this, Doyle is credited with creating the investigative detective. Sherlock Holmes would also appear in 56 short stories and three other novels, "The Sign of Four" in 1890, "The Hound of the Baskervilles" in 1902, and "The Valley of Fear" in 1915. Over time, Sherlock Holmes became an intensely popular character with the public, leading Doyle to become one of the most highly paid-short-story writers of his time. When he killed off the Sherlock Holmes character in one of his stories in 1893, public demand and pressure from his publisher, the "Strand Magazine," forced him to bring the character back to life three years later to continue the Sherlock Holmes crime-solving adventures. Doyle has also written numerous historical novels, political motivative books, other adventure tales, romances, and plays, including a series of short stories and novels featuring a fictional Professor Challenger, which have been turned into movies and television series. During the later decades of his life, he abandoned his Roman Catholic faith and wrote fiction to study and lecture on spiritualism, the communication with the souls of the dead, a topic that interested the general public in the 1920s, as well as him with his family losses. As a widower with two children, he married for a second time, having three more children, yet had no grandchildren. During World War I, his oldest son Kingsley died in London from wounds received in France in 1918, as well as his only brother, Brigadier General Innes Doyles, in Belgium in 1919. His middle name, Conan, was his paternal grandmother's maiden name and was continued in his children's names. After publishing the 1900 political text, "The Great Boer War," which supported England's stance on the war, he was given the rank of Knight Bachelor by King Edward VII in the 1902 Coronation Honours. Sir Author Conan Doyle's full-sized statue was erected in Crowborough in East Sussex.