Please note we were concerned to run this article in its entirety for the editing of the 'Sunday Times' version might have given a misleading impression in one respect. Pioneering biographers like Martin Booth deserve nothing but praise for the heroic work they have done to further our understanding of Doyle.

It is a remarkable fact that, although Arthur Conan Doyle creator of Sherlock Holmes, ranks among the most famous of all Victorian writers and easily the most durable in terms of film and TV, his life is shrouded in quite as much mystery as one of his own stories. Countless biographers have rehearsed what is known, but to a very large extent that was dictated by Doyle himself for not a single researcher has ever had unhampered access to his personal papers. Indeed, following bitter legal battles, these papers have not been seen by anyone for half a century and nobody can even say for sure where they are, or if they have been destroyed. Consequently Doyle's life has become a constant focus of scandalous rumour, like the recent claim he was an accomplice to murder which was described as 'laughable' both by police and historians but was widely publicised.

More recent biographers like Martin Booth and Owen Dudley Edwards have had to do heroic detective work of their own to arrive at new facts. In researching my novel 'The Patient's Eyes' (as well as the original 'Murder Rooms' television drama and those that follow this autumn) I have been consistently amazed by what has been found. That Doyle himself suppressed many facts, especially about his early life, has never been in doubt. But even in the published writing like his autobiogrpahy there are many clues to the truth provided we scrutinise them alongside the newer evidence.

It is now well known that the basis of Sherlock Holmes was Joseph Bell, the charismatic teacher Doyle met in Edinburgh in 1878 while studying medicine. Thin, wiry, dark, handsome, with the long fingers of a pianist and the aquiline features of an actor, Bell was one of the foremost medical academics of his generation a consulting surgeon and also incidentally Queen Victoria's personal doctor when in Scotland. Even in the guarded prose of his autobiography Doyle was emphatic in describing the man as the most important person he met in all his crucial years in Edinburgh where Holmes was effectively conceived. Indeed in one of the few letters available (thanks to the Bell family) Doyle wrote to his former teacher: 'It is to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes.'

Up to now research has often concentrated on establishing the links between Joseph Bell and Sherlock Holmes of which there are many. Bell taught Doyle most of the deductive tricks which later appeared in the books, and may as we shall see have taught him more than we previously thought about crime and detection. But there was far more to the meeting than that, indeed to understand its significance we have to explore the strange and appalling circumstances of Doyle's life at the time, circumstances which he appears to have done everything in his power to conceal.

His attempts were so successful that the full story is only now starting to emerge, and it is quite as gothic as any fiction Doyle ever wrote. By the late 1870s, as we now know, his father Charles appears to have been enduring an agonized twilight existence in the Doyle family home as he made a spectacular decline into drunken insanity. Doyle, living at home thoughout his student days, would have experienced this at close quarters. It was years before his father was committed to a mental institution, and even then there was at least one violent escape attempt. All of this was bad enough for the young Doyle in those crucial years and the horror of it is reflected in his work, not least in eerie Holmes stories like 'The Crooked Man' and 'The Yellow Face'. But there was far worse.

For during this crucial period Doyle's mother's affections had strayed. With his sisters largely away, he may well have been the sole grown up witness to the spectacle of his father being cuckolded in his own home and by a man who was only five years older than Arthur Conan Doyle himself.

Bryan Waller was a young doctor fifteen years younger than Doyle's mother Mary. He arrived first as a lodger while Doyle was still away at school but the emotional attachment to Doyle's mother was quickly formed and soon he took over the house with Charles Doyle still in it. Waller's physical relationship with Mary cannot be proved but there are suggestive facts. The last child born to Doyle's mother, when her husband was already far into his illness and Waller ruled the roost, was christened Bryan Julia Doyle (Julia being the name of Bryan Waller's mother). Eventually Waller moved Mary Doyle to his estate in Masongill in the Pennines where she lived until she was 80 and where rumours have survived to this day not merely about the relationship, but about the true parentage of Bryan Julia Doyle.

The arrangement was bizarre and in almost every contemporary account Waller emerges as a cruel, arrogant and snobbish (if cultured) man with a notorious temper. So what on earth can life have been like for Doyle in his most formative teenage years, years when he met Bell and the seeds of Sherlock Holmes were sown?

As yet, we have no letters to consult. But Doyle's own silence on the subject of Bryan Waller and a household which bears a startling resemblance to'Hamlet' with Doyle as prince, is suggestive. According to all recent biographers, Waller must have been a crucial influence and probably determined Doyle's career choice. But in the whole of Conan Doyle's writing there is not a single solitary mention of him. Doyle's autobiography is written as if Waller never existed. But this spectacularly evasive book, published well after Doyle's mother's death, does contain one chilling if elliptical reference to the whole affair, and it was surely placed by Doyle in the full knowledge that Waller himself, unlike his mother, was still alive to read it. 'My mother,' Doyle wrote of his student days 'had adopted the device of sharing a large house, which may have eased her in some ways, but was disastrous in others&ldots;'

'Disastrous'? The adjective speaks volumes but the author makes no further attempt to explain it, moving on instead to describe 'the most notable' encounter of his university life, and the man who represented everything that the vain and bullying Waller was not. And this was Joseph Bell. 'For some reason I have never understood,' Doyle writes with obvious feeling ' he singled me out...'

It is hard to imagine a more important moment for the young Doyle than the arrival of Bell at this desperate time. At home were two highly disturbing fathers, the one pathetic, the other a threatening usurper. And then, like a miracle, enter the handsome charismatic teacher. The drama of such a meeting in such extraordinary circumstances was, I am sure, the spark that ignited Holmes. And for me it was not merely an irrestible spur for a thriller but for an imaginative reconstruction of Doyle's whole world.

I had always wanted to write a story around the Holmes myth. Not Holmes meeting Freud or Jack the Ripper or Frankenstein, not Holmes with love interest or with a smarter brother or a female assistant or any of the myriad other variations on the theme. I wanted to try a different approach entirely that would, without overt pastiche, shed authentic light on the birth of the detective and include areas that Doyle himself knew about, but could never publicly explore. Though it returns to Edinburgh and Southsea, the novel 'The Patient's Eyes' actually begins in the second most tortured and mysterious period of Doyle's life, the years leading up to the turn of the century when the writer had killed off his detective and was tending his invalid wife even though he had already fallen in love with another woman. Because I truly believe many of Doyle's best stories are grounded in his own conflicts and his pain, I found it productive and exciting to extend the metaphor into a series of difficult and occasionally traumatic cases undertaken with Joseph Bell.

The idea of Bell and Doyle as a somewhat reluctant team is not quite as fantastical as it seems. For there is no question that Joseph Bell did have a secret. Shortly before Doyle met him in 1878 he had been called in by the crown to sort out a murder case in Edinburgh which was going badly wrong. The murderer was a Frenchman called Eugene Chantrelle, the victim was Chantrelle's wife but there had been many blunders in the case and Joseph Bell managed to steer the doctors and police back on the right track, before personally tracing the cause of death to a doctored gas-pipe. At least three contemporary accounts by pathologists and colleagues attest to the doctor's crucial role yet Bell preferred to work in confidence and insisted his name was kept out of the trial.

He was especially careful not to attend the execution, but on this occasion he had underestimated his man. For Chantrelle knew Bell's role at first hand and now saw a magnificent way of getting his revenge. On the gallows itself, as many attest, Chantrelle made a point of airily asking the forensic pathologist Littlejohn to pass on his compliments to the absent Dr. Bell for bringing him to justice.

This sudden unexpected publicity must have been embarrassing for Bell and may well explain why his preference for anonymity now became something of an obsession. We know from his colleagues there were many more cases but the details are far harder to establish.

What Doyle made of Bell's detective work remains another mystery. But the Chantrelle case happened in the year the two men first met so he could hardly have avoided hearing about it, if not from Bell then from colleagues and students. The idea of Doyle having any direct involvement in Bell's criminal work is much less likely, but not utterly impossible. On the net, you can even find rumours of a loose-leaf typed manuscript dating from the last century entitled 'Joseph Bell's Criminal cases' that was seen by an Edinburgh book-dealer in the 1950s. The idea is tantalizing for if these truly were Doyle's notes of Bell's criminal work, here would be that holy grail of holy grails: the true stories of Sherlock Holmes. But there are no names and no specifics, so unfortunately the manuscript seems no more likely to exist than the endless 'lost' memoirs of Dr. Watson described so lovingly at the start of every other Holmes imitation.

Literary urban myths like this perhaps occur because until now there has been such a vacuum in our knowledge. And because too there have been signs of cover up and destroyed evidence. When Bryan Waller died in Masongill in 1932, members of his staff were urgently instructed to go to the attic and hurl from the window onto the lawn all Waller's personal papers including notebooks and diaries. These were then taken to the back of the house and burned on a bonfire. But one servant glanced at a diary and according to her statement it contained a jealous lament by the woman Waller married late in life, about her husband's continuing relationship with Mrs. Doyle.

Later, Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Arthur, restricted access and threatened legal action when any interpretation or fact did not suit him. Letters were made available at his whim and withdrawn again when the conclusions of this or that biographer did not appeal. After Adrian died, the long and complex legal case began, arising in the first isntance it would seem out of accusations against Adrian's running of the estate.

As a result of all this it is hard to establish even the whereabouts of the papers. One cache in Switzerland appears in the end to have yielded very little. But even as we await a resolution which will at last enable an informed and unbiased view, I think there are already two inescapable conclusions. The first is that Doyle's casual and distanced account of the origins of Sherlock Holmes is not remotely the whole truth. Just as Stoker naively blamed Count Dracula on a meal of crab and Mary Shelley put Frankenstein down to a party- game, Doyle's reflections on his own gothic creation, while genuinely meant, reveal all the usual hall-marks of a 19th century author sanitizing a painful literary birth. Given the personal circumstances he was trying to hide, his ambivalence about it seems entirely understandable.

But the second is that at last we are starting to get closer to a proper understanding of that birth and therefore of Doyle himself. And everything we discover is pointing to a far more extraordinary, troubled and mysterious man than was ever dreamed of by his public.