In addition to the series of stories chronicling the activities of Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr John Watson for which he is well known, Doyle wrote on a wide range of topics, both fictional and non-fictional.

[3] In July 1891 Doyle published the short story "A Scandal in Bohemia" in The Strand Magazine—a "story which would change his life", according to his biographer, Andrew Lycett, as it introduced Holmes and Watson to a wide audience; the duo had provided the subject of Doyle's first novel, A Study in Scarlet, which was published in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887.

Doyle, fearful of having his other work overshadowed by his fictional detective, killed his creation off in December 1893 in "The Adventure of the Final Problem".

In 1912 he began the adventure series featuring Professor Challenger, who first appeared in The Lost World—both in short stories and novels.

Following the close successive deaths of his son and his brother, Doyle turned to spiritualism and wrote extensively on the subject;[1][3] his biographer Owen Dudley Edwards writes that at the time of Doyle's death in July 1930, while the writer "most wanted to be remembered as a champion of spiritualism and as a historical novelist, it is Sherlock Holmes who has continued to capture the imagination of the public".