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With his two children from Louisa, they all moved to a new home called Windlesham, in Sussex. He would spend the rest of his life living in that lovely house while keeping a small flat in London.

Arthur Conan Doyle was so happy to share many of his wife's activities that his literary output slowed down considerably after his marriage. During the next years, he tried his hand at a number of plays, one based on Brigadier Gerard, the other on The Tragedy of the Korosko. Neither of them did well. Not one to give-up, he wrote a third one about boxing, he named The House of Temperley, which closed after three months. To make-up for his considerable financial losses, Conan Doyle set out to write a fourth play, but this time with Sherlock Holmes. At first he called it The Stonor Case but later reverted to calling it The Speckled Band, which was well known and had been so successful. One of the difficulties of the production was the casting of the snake. The author insisted upon a live reptile, whereas the actors and the crew begged for an artificial one. Conan Doyle won, but later wrote admitting his mistake: "The Python either hung down like a pudgy yellow bell rope, or else when his tail was pinched, endeavored to squirm back and get level with the stage carpenter who pinched him, which was not in the script." Happily, the play got rave reviews, and made the author a lot of money.

After the success of The Speckled Band, Conan Doyle chose to retire from "stage work," "Not because it doesn't interest me, but because it interests me too much," he said. The birth of his two sons, Denis in 1909 and that of Adrian in 1910, also contributed to keep the author from concentrating on fiction. A last child, their daughter Jean, was born in 1912.

A couple of years went by before the author's next creation, the delightfully outrageous Professor Challenger, whose own wife called "a perfectly impossible person." His new hero was quite the opposite of Sherlock Holmes; nevertheless, The Lost World was an immediate success. It involved the Professor in a delightfully humorous adventure, with a number of other highly personable characters, stranded in a mysterious region of South America, discovering prehistoric fauna and flora. Continued...