1. As one of the handful of writers to play first class cricket, he was so proud of getting the legendary batsman W.G. Grace out (caught by the wicket-keeper off his bowling) that he composed a celebratory poem called ‘A Reminiscence of Cricket’ which began:

‘Once in my heyday of cricket,
Oh, day I shall ever recall!
I captured that glorious wicket,
The greatest, the grandest of all.’

2. He tested drugs on himself. He wasn’t a cocaine addict like his creation, Sherlock Holmes, but, as a student doctor, he was fascinated by the effects of alkaloids as drugs. As a locum in Birmingham he tested the effect of the potentially poisonous plant gelseminum on himself, gradually increasing the amount well past the fatal dose. The wife of the doctor he was working for threatened to tell his mother. But he wrote up the experiment for the British Medical Journal.

3. His first story, written when he was six, was about a group of men surprised by a Bengal tiger. He later wrote that he learnt early on that, as a writer, it was ‘very easy to get people into scrapes, and very hard to get them out again’.

4. With his friend J.M. Barrie, he wrote a comic opera called Jane Annie: Or, the Good Conduct Prize. The subject matter - about some male students infiltrating an all girls’ academy – could have been interesting. But the effect was dire. George Bernard Shaw described it as ‘the most unblushing piece of tomfoolery that two respectable citizens could conceivably indulge in public’.

5. He was an early advocate of the Channel Tunnel. Before the First World War he argued this was essential to safeguard food and other essential supplies in the event of hostilities.

6. He disliked writing his Sherlock Holmes stories and tried to kill his detective off at the Reichenbach Falls. He believed he was destined to write much greater works of literature, particularly historical novels, such as The White Company, about the Hundred Years War, published in 1891.

7. One of his many public campaigns (along with Divorce Law Reform and the rehabilitation of George Edalji, the half Indian solicitor accused of animal molestation – the subject of Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur and George) was for better body armour for the troops in the First World War – a subject on which he wrote to The Times on 4 August 1916

8. Conan Doyle’s horoscope (now in the British Library) shows that he was born at 4.55 am on 22 May 1859. His rising sign was Gemini (with Mercury as his ruling planet) while his moon was in Aquarius.

9. His first Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual 1887 – exactly 120 years ago. In draft form the story was known as ‘A Tangled Skein’. Before publication it featured a detective called Sherrinford Holmes who shared rooms at 221B Upper Baker Street with a character called Ormond Sacker.

10. Six days after his death, Conan Doyle appeared at his own memorial service attended by 6,000 people in the Albert Hall – or so claimed the medium Estelle Roberts who was conducting proceedings. In keeping with his spiritualist beliefs, an empty chair had been reserved for him – and he duly obliged with his presence. His widow Jean later said she never took a decision without his say-so.

Andrew Lycett’s biography Conan Doyle The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson £20.00

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist