At 221B Baker Street, London, lived Sherlock Holmes, the greatest of all fictional detectives. He was the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), who published 60 stories about him, including three full length novels. The character was in part suggested by that of Dr Joseph Bell an eminent Edinburgh surgeon under whom Conan Doyle studied medicine. The author’s experience as a doctor also gave him the necessary background for the creation of Dr Watson, the supposed narrator of the Holmes stories, who served as a foil for the great detective and became almost as famous as his companion.
Sherlock Holmes arrived at his solutions by acute observation and brilliant reasoning. His first case was A Study in Scarlet (1887), a full-length novel. But it was not until short stories began to appear regularly in the Strand Magazine that he and his creator became famous. After the stores had been collected in two books, Conan Doyle became tired of his hero and arranged a suitably heroic death for him in a struggle with his great enemy Moriarty. However, the public refused to accept that Holmes’s life really endeed in that struggle, so the detective was resurrected, and Conan Doyle continued to write about him until his own death.
Apart from Holmes, Conan Doyle wrote other fine stories including The Lost World, The White Company and The Poison Belt. He was also he author of a History of Spirtualism, and histories of the South African War and the British campaigns on the Western Front in the First World War.
Picture credit: google