In Part 2, when Doyle moves the narrative decades earlier to the American West, we see Lucy and John Ferrier, pioneers who struggle to survive in the desert after much of their settlement dies of dehydration. At the beginning of the novel, John Watson has just come back to England from the Second Afghan War, which began in 1878 after the British invaded Afghanistan in order to prevent Russian expansion into India. The novel is set in the late 19th century, at a time when British imperialism was at its height and when an ideology of manifest destiny and the California gold rush motivated American pioneers to continue the westward expansion of the United States. He had five children, Mary and Kingsley from his first wife Louisa Hawkins, and Denis, Adrian, and Jean from his second wife Jean Leckie.
In 1930, Doyle suffered a heart attack and died in Sussex at the age of 71. In addition to his Holmes stories and historical novels, he also wrote a few medical articles, plays, and poetry collections, as well as political works defending the Boer War (for example, The Great Boer War and The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, for which Doyle was awarded a knighthood) and other nonfiction books defending spiritualism, the belief that the living can communicate with the spirits of the dead, and the existence of supernatural phenomena ( The History of Spiritualism and The Coming of the Fairies). Though Holmes and Watson met with great public acclaim and popularity, Doyle himself viewed his Holmes stories as “low art.” Preferring to concentrate his literary energies on other matters, he wrote several historical novels based on British history (such as Micah Clarke and The Great Shadow), which he regarded as his greater work. After being poorly paid by the publisher Ward Lock, Doyle began to publish his Holmes stories in the newly created Strand Magazine. A prolific writer, Doyle wrote his first Holmes story in 1886. Though he is best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, he was also a physician, amateur sportsman, travel enthusiast, and spiritualist missionary. In 1859, Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh to Irish Catholic parents Charles Doyle and Mary Foley.
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