Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is a fictional private detective created by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. First appeared in print in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet, the character’s popularity became widespread with the first series of short stories in The Strand Magazine. Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science, and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic.

About Sherlock Holmes in brief

Summary Sherlock HolmesSherlock Holmes is a fictional private detective created by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. First appeared in print in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet, the character’s popularity became widespread with the first series of short stories in The Strand Magazine. Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science, and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic. By the 1990s there were already over 25,000 stage adaptations, films, television productions and publications featuring the detective, and Guinness World Records lists him as the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history. Holmes’s popularity and fame are such that many have believed him to be not a fictional character but a real individual. Avid readers of the Holmes stories helped create the modern practice of fandom. Holmes was inspired by the real-life figure of Joseph Bell, a surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, whom Conan Doyle met in 1877 and had worked for as a clerk. Sir Henry Littlejohn, Chair of Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, is also cited as an inspiration for Holmes. Other possible inspirations have been proposed, though never acknowledged by Doyle, by French author Henry Cauvain, who imagined a depressed, anti-social, opium-smoking polymath detective, operating in Paris in 1871. The stories of Émile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq were extremely popular at the time Conan Doyle began writing Holmes, and Holmes’s speech and behaviour sometimes follow that of Lecoqu.

Holmes describes his brother as the more intelligent of the two, but notes that Mycroft lacks any interest in physical investigation, preferring to spend his time at the Diogenes Club. Holmes says that he first developed his methods of deduction as an undergraduate at an amateur detective club, which he pursued as an amateur for seven years. His last story, set in August 1914, places his year of birth at 1854; the story describes him as sixty years of age. His parents are not mentioned, although Holmes mentions that his grandmother was sister to the French artist Vernet, without clarifying whether this was Claude Joseph Vernet or Claude Horace Horace Vernet. A statement of Holmes’s age in \”His Last Bow\” places his age at 60 years old, but in the story it is stated that he was born in 1854. The original tales as well as thousands written by authors other than Conan Doyle have been adapted into stage and radio plays, television, films,. video games, and other media for over one hundred years. Conan Doyle once wrote, \”Each is a root from which a whole literature has developed… Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?\” Holmes and Watson discuss Dupin and L ecoq near the beginning of A Study In Scarlet. Holmes and his friend Dr. John H. Watson often share quarters with him at the address of 221B Baker Street, London, where many of the stories begin.