Doyle was so successful in his literary career that he gave up his medical practice to become a full-time writer. Any detective story features a private detective as the prime solver of a crime, usually a murder. The detective is the main protagonist through whom the story is narrated. The detective interrogates the suspects, ferrets out clues and tracks down the culprit.
He shares all the clues with the reader but withholds their significance until the end. For instance, we find several suspects, additional murders and threat of violence. The detective unmasks the culprit only at the end. The detective story evolved in the 20th century. Auguste Dupin. His method of deduction provided the model for detective story writers such as, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Charles Dickens ventured into the writing of detective fiction in The Mystery of Edwin Drood but he died before completing it.
However, it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who perfected the art of writing detective stories with Sherlock Holmes as the detective. Readers are fortunate to see him as a real person still living with them. Produced by Lake House. Skip to main content. Search form.
Sherlock Holmes is still alive! They were helpless, so the crestfallen tourist walked on muttering something to himself. The reading public of Victorian England flipped out over the death of Sherlock Holmes. See, Sherlock Holmes was a bit like the Harry Potter of his day. So imagine if J. Rowling just got tired of writing about Harry after book five and just killed him off and said "the end. And this is pretty much what happened after Holmes died. People wrote angry letters; thousands of people cancelled their subscription to the magazine where the Sherlock Holmes stories were published, The Strand.
But, Conan Doyle was able to get away with his fictional homicidal ways for nearly a decade. Conan Doyle never explicitly said why he decided to bring Sherlock Holmes back to life, but he was definitely pressured to do so by both the public and his publishers. So Conan Doyle brought back his creation for a reunion tour in a novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles , published in The Strand magazine between This story, a sort of prequel, was set before Holmes had his unfortunate cliff diving accident, so there was no resurrection just yet.
This novel succeeded in getting everyone hyped up on Holmes once again, and Conan Doyle finally agreed to start publishing new Sherlock Holmes stories. So Holmes rose from the dead and a new series of short stories, collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes , were published between in The Strand magazine, which was thrilled to have it's cash cow detective back in print.
Interestingly, the stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes are set mainly in Holmes "died" in "The Final Problem" in , so in the Holmes universe he had only been fake-dead for three years, not ten. However, Watson himself narrates these stories from the present, , after Holmes had retired and had given Watson permission to publish their exploits. Sherlock Holmes is a pop culture phenomenon, and he's one worth knowing about.
After all, Holmes is one of the most popular, and most frequently cited, literary characters of all time. There's clearly something going on there that strikes people's interest. But what's really interesting is that Holmes is one of those larger-than-life characters that everyone knows, but that few people really know all that much about.
Sherlock Holmes has been interpreted and reinterpreted so many times, in movies, TV shows, and even just throwaway references, that it's hard to know exactly who this guy is.
The Sherlock Holmes that exists in today's pop culture, and the Watson for that matter, are actually different in a lot of ways from the characters that exist in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's stories. So, by actually reading Sherlock Holmes stories, you can really be in the know. The prolific Doyle then turned his attention to other literary pursuits he considered more serious. But an commission to write a second Holmes novel, Th e Sign of Four , sent the series off and running.
Doyle wrote fitfully about Holmes until , finally declaring he was done for good. But he left behind an enigmatic sleuth who all but demands reinvention and rediscovery through the imaginations of others.
Because Doyle kept Holmes removed from readers, wholly perceived and experienced except in three stories through the occasionally dubious accounts of Dr. Holmes is not so much a whole-cloth character as he is an aggregate of tantalizing details that inspire both comfort and curiosity.
It is the paradoxical appeal of Holmes—heroic but repellent, remote but indomitable, machine-like yet persuasively human—that causes him to linger in hearts and minds.
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