Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where one of his professors, Joseph Bell, drummed into the young Doyle the importance of using his powers of observation to help him deduce the nature of a patient’s illness. It was this attention to detail which was to make him such a good writer.
His third novel, A Study in Scarlet, which was published in 1887, introduced the famous detective Sherlock Holmes to the world, and his Sherlock Holmes novels and stories are still as popular as ever.
But Arthur Conan Doyle did not confine himself to Sherlock Holmes. He wrote several popular works of historic fiction, and a series of books featuring the intrepid Professor Challenger. Although The Lost World is by far the best known, Challenger also features in The Poison Belt, The Land of Mist, When the World Screamed and The Disintegration Machine.