Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may have written stories about the world's most rational detective, but he himself had a New Agey, spiritual side. He was a believer in spirits and magic. In fact, he wrote a pamphlet in 1922 called The Coming of the Fairies, about a set of (clearly fake—we mean, c'mon) photographs of a pair of girls with some small winged creatures. Even in his day, people thought that Conan Doyle was a bit nutty for believing in the most ridiculous looking photographs of fairies that you could possibly imagine.
Conan Doyle was a medical doctor as well as a writer (though he made way more money on Sherlock Holmes than he ever made as a physician), and he didn't believe in staying away from trouble. When the Boer War broke out in South Africa in 1899, he traveled south to become a medic at a field hospital in the town of Bloemfontein. Conan Doyle also published a book in 1901 on his experiences in South Africa called The Great Boer War. (Source.)
Conan Doyle didn't only write about detectives; he also became one. He got involved in a number of true crime cases as an amateur criminologist (source). One of these real-life cases is the subject of the book Arthur and George, by prize-winning novelist Julian Barnes. It tells the story of Arthur Conan Doyle's efforts to help an Indian doctor named George Edalji, who was wrongfully convicted of a series of horse mutilations in Great Wyrley, Staffordshire, England.