Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ DL (22 May 1859 - 7 July 1930) was a British writer best known for his detective fiction featuring the character Sherlock Holmes. Doyle wrote fifty-six short stories and four novels featuring the famous detective. He also wrote fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and other historical novels.
Peter Haining wrote and edited a number of acclaimed books on the supernatural, including Ghosts: The Illustrated History, and A Dictionary of Ghosts, as well as fiction anthologies The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories.
He also collected and edited several books about Sherlock Holmes including The Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook and The Television Sherlock Holmes to tie in with the iconic Jeremy Brett series of the eighties and nineties. A former publisher and much admired figure, he died in 2007. He lived in a sixteenth-century house in Suffolk that is haunted by the ghost of a Napoleonic prisoner of war.