Scottish novelist and short story writer, Arthur Conan Doyle has been 'chiefly remembered for his creation of the private detective Sherlock Holmes. Holmes first appeared (with his friend Dr Watson, the narrator of the stories) in A Study in Scarlet (1887), and featured in more than fifty stories and in novels such as The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).

'During the last decade of his life Doyle began spending great sums of money and travelled many thousands of miles to proselytize for the Spiritualist cause'. He subsequently lectured in Australia and New Zealand (1920-1921), the United States and Canada (1922-1923), France (1925), South Africa, Rhodesia, Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya (1928-1929), Scandinavia and Holland (1929), and England (1916-1930).

(Sources: The Oxford Dictionary of English (rev. ed.), Oxford Reference Online; Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology)