1. He compared Sherlock Holmes—arguably his greatest creation—to pâté de foie gras.
…And Doyle really hated pâté de foie gras. He told a friend, “I have had such an overdose of [Holmes] that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day.”
2. We live in a world with Doyle’s fiction because no one wanted him as their doctor.
If at first you don’t succeed at being a doctor, become a world-famous novelist! After getting his medical degree from the University of Edinburgh Medical School and serving as a ship’s surgeon, Doyle opened his own practice in Southsea. Hardly any patients came, so he began writing fiction in his free time.
3. Doyle and Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie were on the same cricket team.
The team was called the Allah-Akabarries, a combination of Barrie’s name and an Arabic phrase meaning, “May the Lord help us.” The two men met at university and remained lifelong friends.
4. He once bought a car without ever having driven one.
Best way to learn, right? Doyle was one of Britain’s early prominent motorists, and he quickly took to the emerging form of transport, entering an international road competition in 1911.
5. He spent a million dollars trying to convince the world that fairies were real.
Not only did Doyle believe fairies existed, he worked pretty tirelessly to make other people believe too. His million went to promoting the authenticity of the infamous Cottingley Fairy photographs—a hoax, if you’re a skeptic, and not a true believer like Doyle—and he later wrote a book called The Coming of the Fairies.
To read the rest, go to: https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/520-10-little-known-facts-about-sir-arthur-conan-doyle?fb_ref=Default
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