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59 free Arthur Conan Doyle trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Arthur Conan Doyle trivia quiz is about the man rather than the detective: the Edinburgh doctor who wrote A Study in Scarlet in three weeks, sold it for £25, grew to hate his creation, threw him off a waterfall and was forced to bring him back. The easy questions cover the birthplace, the profession, the university teacher who inspired Holmes, the magazine that made him rich, the knighthood and the friendship with Houdini. From there it moves through a strange life: the Arctic whaler, the failed eye practice, the goalkeeping alias, the MCC cricket wicket of W. G. Grace, the bodybuilding contest he judged, the Boer War hospital, two failed runs for Parliament and the wrongly convicted men he cleared. The harder end covers the Cottingley Fairies, the seances, the Piltdown suspicion, the Congo pamphlet, the Crimes Club, the ski article that sold Switzerland to the British, the house he helped design and the epitaph on his grave in the New Forest. Every answer was checked against Doyle's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. For the stories themselves, our Sherlock Holmes quiz is the natural next stop.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Arthur Conan Doyle born in 1859?
Edinburgh
A statue of Sherlock Holmes now stands in Picardy Place, close to the house where he was born.
Q 02What was Doyle's profession before he became a full-time writer?
Physician
He studied medicine at university and later completed an M.D. with a dissertation on tabes dorsalis.
Q 03According to his baptism record, how was 'Conan' recorded?
As a given name
'Conan' was a given name after his godfather Michael Conan; he began using it as a sort of surname after school.
Q 04Why was the Doyle family split up and housed with different families in 1864?
His father's growing alcoholism
Charles Altamont Doyle died in 1893 in the Crichton Royal asylum after years of psychiatric illness.
Q 05Which Jesuit school in Lancashire did Doyle attend until 1875?
Stonyhurst College
He remembered it as harsh and 'run on medieval principles', then spent a year at Stella Matutina in Austria.
Q 06On what kind of vessel did Doyle serve as ship's doctor in 1880?
A Greenland whaler
The Hope of Peterhead met the Eira expedition that went on to name Cape Flora and other features of Franz Josef Land.
Q 07Which real maritime mystery did Doyle's 'J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement' popularise, with invented details that stuck?
The Mary Celeste
His spelling 'Marie Celeste' and his claim that the boats were still aboard are still repeated as fact.
Q 08In which town did Doyle set up an unsuccessful medical practice in 1882, arriving with less than £10?
Southsea, Portsmouth
Waiting for patients who never came, he went back to writing fiction.
Q 09Which medical specialism did Doyle try, and fail, to master in Vienna in 1891?
Ophthalmology
He could not follow the German terms in lectures, went ice skating instead, and later had no patients at all in Wimpole Street.
Q 10How long did it take Doyle to write A Study in Scarlet?
Three weeks
He was 27 and sold all rights for a pittance; it appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887.
Q 11How much did Ward Lock pay Doyle for all rights to A Study in Scarlet?
£25
Feeling exploited, he left Ward Lock after The Sign of the Four and took Holmes to the Strand.
Q 12Which of Doyle's university teachers was the chief model for Sherlock Holmes?
Joseph Bell
Robert Louis Stevenson spotted it at once, writing 'can this be my old friend Joe Bell?'.
Q 13Dr Watson owes his surname to whom?
A Portsmouth medical colleague of Doyle's
Dr James Watson lent nothing else to the character but the name.
Q 21Under what pseudonym did Doyle play in goal for an amateur football club?
A. C. Smith
He was also an amateur boxer, a keen golfer and a billiards competitor.
Q 22Doyle's single first-class cricket wicket for the MCC was which legendary batsman?
W. G. Grace
He was so pleased he wrote a poem about it; his highest score was 43.
Q 23Which cricket side, captained by Doyle, also included the creators of Peter Pan, Jeeves and Winnie-the-Pooh?
The Authors XI
His scores in its matches were by far the commonest entries in his diary.
Q 14Where did the monthly Sherlock Holmes short stories appear from 1891, making Doyle one of the best-paid writers?
The Strand Magazine
'A Scandal in Bohemia' was the first of twenty-four; he wrote the first five from his empty consulting room in Devonshire Place.
Q 15How did Doyle's mother reply when he wrote in 1891 that he was thinking of 'slaying Holmes'?
'You won't! You can't! You mustn't!'
He tried to price publishers out instead, but they paid whatever he asked.
Q 16At which Swiss waterfall did Doyle send Holmes and Moriarty to their apparent deaths?
The Reichenbach Falls
The nearby town of Meiringen still celebrates the connection.
Q 17Public outcry brought Holmes back in which 1901 novel?
The Hound of the Baskervilles
'The Adventure of the Empty House' in 1903 explained that only Moriarty had gone over the edge.
Q 18How many Sherlock Holmes short stories did Doyle write in total?
56
Plus four novels; the last story appeared in 1927, three years before his death.
Q 19Which irascible scientist did Doyle create for The Lost World in 1912?
Professor Challenger
The book gave its name to a whole subgenre of speculative fiction; Challenger later returned in the spiritualist novel The Land of Mist.
Q 20Doyle's humorous stories about a Napoleonic soldier feature which character?
Brigadier Gerard
He also wrote seven historical novels including The White Company, which he and many critics rated above the Holmes stories.
Q 24In 1901 Doyle judged Eugen Sandow's world-first major competition in which sport?
Bodybuilding
It was held at the Royal Albert Hall; the sculptor Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge and Sandow himself were the other judges.
Q 25Doyle was invited in 1909 to referee which heavyweight championship fight in Reno, Nevada?
James Jeffries v Jack Johnson
His friends pictured him ending up 'with a revolver at one ear and a razor at the other'; distance and engagements stopped him.
Q 26Doyle's 1894 magazine article 'An Alpine Pass on Ski' is credited with popularising what?
Skiing in Switzerland
Skiing was then almost unknown in Switzerland; the article began the country's long association with the sport.
Q 27What was the name of Doyle's first wife, whom he married in 1885 and who suffered from tuberculosis?
Louisa Hawkins
He met Jean Leckie in 1897 but kept the relationship platonic until Louisa's death in 1906, marrying Jean the next year.
Q 28How many living direct descendants does Doyle have?
None
None of his five children had children of their own.
Q 29During which war did Doyle serve as a volunteer doctor at a field hospital in Bloemfontein?
The Second Boer War
His pamphlet defending Britain's conduct there was, he believed, the reason he was knighted in 1902.
Q 30Which monarch knighted Doyle in the 1902 Coronation Honours?
Edward VII
He received the accolade in person at Buckingham Palace on 24 October 1902 and was gazetted simply as Doyle.