Sherlock Holmes Articles

Sherlock Holmes

Starry Night

Over most of my lifetime, I have been fascinated by Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle wrote nearly five dozen short stories and four novels about Sherlock Holmes, the Consulting Detective. When I was young, I had watched on TV many of the movie featuring Basil Rathbone, who portrayed Doyle’s famous detective. Interestingly, those films came out between 1939 and 1946. I was born in the middle of that series. The Hound of the Baskervilles was Basil Rathbone’s first film starring as Sherlock Holmes.

While I and millions of others have enjoyed Sherlock Holmes, Doyle was knighted not for his writing about Sherlock Holmes but that of his journalistic work related to the Second Boer War in South Africa. Additionally, he was more interested in historical novels than the detective who lived at 221B Baker Street.

In fact, Doyle wrote to his mother, “I think of slaying Holmes, ... and winding him up for good.... He takes my mind from better things.” In fact, he wrote The Final Problem, which ends with Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes. They both plunged to their deaths at the Grand Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Nonetheless, his readers couldn’t tolerate the end of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle’s mother wrote to him about his wanting to end Sherlock Holmes. She wrote, “You won't! You can't! You mustn't!” So, instead of ending his stories, he told his publisher that he wanted a huge amount of money for continuing to write about Sherlock Holmes. His publisher paid him whatever he asked, which made him the wealthiest writer of the time. As a result, his next story was The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Doyle attended the University of Edinburgh and graduated with a medical degree and used Dr. Joseph Bell as this model for Sherlock Holmes. Doyle said that Bell could look at his patient and diagnose the person’s problem, which Holmes was able to do.

In addition, Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which is considered the first detective novel. Poe’s detective, Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, influenced Doyle in his creating Sherlock Holmes.

As much as Doyle wanted to move away from writing about Sherlock Holmes, he became involved in two cases of people convicted of crimes and got both exonerated. His efforts led to the Court of Criminal Appeal in Great Britain.

At a personal level, I did post-graduate studies at the University of Edinburgh in the late 60s and returned in 2013. I lived next to the castle at Ramsey Garden, which was in walking distance to New College of the University of Edinburgh. It is a fascinating city with a long list of famous writers and thinkers who once lived there. This is a statue in honor of Arthur Conan Doyle, but it is of Sherlock Holmes.

Starry Night