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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

"Sherlock Holmes (1854 - 1957, according to William S. Baring-Gould) is a fictional detective of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, created by British author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes is famous for his prowess at using logic and astute observation to solve cases." The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twelve stories that were originally published in the Strand Magazine from July 1981 to June 1982.

"Sherlock Holmes describes himself as a 'consulting detective,' an expert who is brought into cases that have proven too difficult for other investigators; we are told that he is often able to solve a problem without leaving his home. Naturally, this aspect is minimized in the stories themselves, which tend to focus on the more interesting cases that require him to do actual legwork. He specializes in solving unusual cases using his extraordinary powers of observation and logical reasoning, and frequently demonstrates these powers to new clients by making on the spot observations about their personalities and their recent activities.

"Sir Arthur Conan Doyle credits the inception of Holmes to his teacher at the medical school of Edinburgh University, the gifted surgeon and forensic detective Joseph Bell, forensic science being a new field at the time. However, some years later, Bell wrote to Conan Doyle: 'You are yourself Sherlock Holmes and well you know it' (Baring-Gould, p. 8). The 'Sherlock Holmes' name was derived from a pair of cricketers; however, some early notes give his name as Sherrinford Holmes. 'Holmes' was named after Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom Conan Doyle admired, and an English cricketer named Sherlock."
(Quoted from Wikipedia)

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"Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (May 22, 1859 - July 7, 1930) is the British author most famously known for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction. He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction.

"He was born in 1859 in Edinburgh to Irish parents who had immigrated to Scotland. He was sent to the Jesuit preparatory school Stonyhurst at the age of nine, and by the time he left the school in 1875, he rejected Christianity to become an agnostic. From 1876 to 1881, he studied medicine at Edinburgh University, including a period working in the town of Aston (now a district of Birmingham). Following his term at University, he served as a ship's doctor on a voyage to the West African coast, and then in 1882 he set up a practice in Plymouth. He won his doctorate in 1885. His medical practice was unsuccessful; while waiting for patients he began writing stories. His first literary experience came in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal before he was 20.

"It was only after he subsequently moved his practice to Southsea that he began to indulge more extensively in literature. His first significant work was A Study in Scarlet, which appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887 and featured the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, who was modeled after Doyle's former University professor, Joseph Bell. Interestingly, Rudyard Kipling congratulated Doyle in his success asking, 'Could this be my old friend, Dr. Joe?'

"In 1885 he married Louise Hawkins, who suffered from tuberculosis and eventually died in 1906. He married Miss Jean Leckie in 1907, whom he had first met and fallen in love with in 1897 but had maintained a platonic relationship with her out of loyalty to his first wife until her death. Doyle had five children, two with his first wife (Mary and Kingsley), and three with his second wife (Jean, Denis, and Adrian).

"In 1890, Doyle studied the eye in Vienna, and in 1891 moved to London to set up a practice as an occulist. This also gave him more time for writing, and in November 1891 he wrote to his mother: 'I think of slaying Holmes . . . and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.' In December 1893 he did so in order to dedicate more of his time to more 'important' works (namely his historical novels), pitting Holmes against his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty. They apparently plunged to their deaths together down a waterfall in the story, 'The Final Problem.' Public outcry led him to bring the character back. Doyle returned to the story in 'The Adventure of the Empty House,' with the ingenious explanation that only Moriarty had fallen, but, since Holmes had other dangerous enemies, he had arranged to be temporarily 'dead' also. Holmes eventually appears in a total of 56 short stories and four Doyle novels (he has since appeared in many novels and stories by other authors, as well).

"Doyle was also a fervent advocate of justice, personally investigating two closed cases. The first case, in 1906, involved a shy half-British, half-Indian lawyer named George Edalji, who had allegedly penned threatening letters and mutilated animals. Police were dead set on Edalji's guilt, even though the mutilations continued even after their suspect was jailed. It was partially as a result of this case that the Court of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907, so not only did Conan Doyle help George Edalji but his work also helped to establish a way to correct other miscarriages of justice. The second case - that of Oscar Slater, a German Jew and gambling-den operator convicted of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman in 1908 - excited Doyle's curiosity because of inconsistencies in the prosecution's case and a general sense that Slater was framed. Both men were eventually released, in large part due to Doyle's efforts.

"In his later years, Doyle became involved with Spiritualism, to the extent that he wrote a Professor Challenger novel on the subject, The Land of Mist. One of the odder aspects of this period of his life was his book The Coming of the Fairies (1921): He was apparently totally convinced of the veracity of the Cottingley fairy photographs, which he reproduced in the book, together with theories about the nature and existence of fairies and spirits. His work on this topic was one of the reasons that one of his short story collections, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929 under the pretense of occultism. However, later this ban was cancelled.

"Doyle was friends for a time with the American magician Harry Houdini, a prominent opponent of the Spiritualist movement. Although Houdini insisted that Spiritualist mediums employed trickery (and consistently attempted to expose them as frauds), Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers, a view expressed in Doyle's The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini was apparently unable to convince Doyle that the former's feats were simply magic tricks, leading to a bitter, public falling out between the two.

"Arthur Conan Doyle is buried in the Church Yard at Minstead in the New Forest, Hampshire, England. A statue has been erected in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's honor. It may be seen at Crowborough Cross in Crowborough, East Sussex, England, where Sir Arthur lived for 23 years. There is also a statue of Sherlock Holmes in Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland - close to the house where Conan Doyle was born."
(Quoted from Wikipedia)

*This text was quoted from Wikipedia articles on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia, where all text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details). This version may contain errors or omissions. If you would like to contribute, modify, or edit an article for the free-content encyclopedia, review Wikipedia's Help page.

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Posted September 15, 2005
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