Who was the writer of the Sherlock Holmes stories?

At the very end of A Study in Scarlet itself, it is shown that Holmes knows Latin and needs no translation of Roman epigrams in the original—though knowledge of the language would be of dubious direct utility for detective work, all university students were required to learn Latin at that time. Later stories also contradict the list. Despite Holmes's supposed ignorance of politics, in "A Scandal in Bohemia" he immediately recognises the true identity of the supposed "Count von Kramm".

Regarding nonsensational literature, his speech is replete with references to the Bible, Shakespeare, even Goethe. He is able to quote from a letter of Flaubert to George Sand and in the original French. Indeed, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes is able to recognise works by Martin Knoller and Joshua Reynolds as such, saying, "Excuse the admiration of a connoisseur .... Watson won't allow that I know anything of art, but that is mere jealousy, since our views upon the subject differ."

Moreover, in "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" Watson reports that in November 1895 "Holmes lost himself in a monograph which he had undertaken upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus"—a most esoteric field, for which Holmes would have had to "clutter his memory" with an enormous amount of information which had absolutely nothing to do with crime-fighting—knowledge so extensive that his monograph was regarded as "the last word" on the subject. 34 The later stories abandon the notion that Holmes did not want to know anything unless it had immediate relevance for his profession; in the second chapter of The Valley of Fear, Holmes instead declares that "all knowledge comes useful to the detective", and near the end of "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane" he describes himself as "an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles". Holmes is also a competent cryptanalyst.

He relates to Watson, "I am fairly familiar with all forms of secret writing, and am myself the author of a trifling monograph upon the subject, in which I analyse one hundred and sixty separate ciphers". One such scheme is solved using frequency analysis in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men". Holmes's analysis of physical evidence is both scientific and precise.

His methods include the use of latent prints such as footprints, hoof prints and bicycle tracks to identify actions at a crime scene (A Study in Scarlet, "The Adventure of Silver Blaze", "The Adventure of the Priory School", The Hound of the Baskervilles, "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"), the use of tobacco ashes and cigarette butts to identify criminals ("The Adventure of the Resident Patient", The Hound of the Baskervilles), the comparison of typewritten letters to expose a fraud ("A Case of Identity"), the use of gunpowder residue to expose two murderers ("The Adventure of the Reigate Squire"), bullet comparison from two crime scenes ("The Adventure of the Empty House"), analysis of small pieces of human remains to expose two murders (The Adventure of the Cardboard Box) and even an early use of fingerprints ("The Norwood Builder"). Holmes also demonstrates knowledge of psychology in several occasions, such as in "A Scandal in Bohemia", where he lures Irene Adler into betraying where she had hidden a photograph based on the "premise" that an unmarried woman will seek her most valuable possession in case of fire, whereas a married woman will grab her baby instead. Despite the excitement of his life (or perhaps seeking to leave it behind), Holmes retired to the Sussex Downs to take up beekeeping ("The Second Stain") and wrote a book on the subject entitled "Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen".

35 His search for relaxation can also be seen in his love for music, notably in "The Red-Headed League", wherein Holmes takes an evening off from a case to listen to Pablo de Sarasate play violin. He also enjoys vocal music, particularly Wagner ("The Adventure of the Red Circle"). Sherlock Holmes remains a great inspiration for forensic science in literature, especially for the way his acute study of a crime scene yields small clues as to the precise sequence of events.

He makes great use of trace evidence such as shoe and tire impressions, as well as fingerprints, ballistics and handwriting analysis, now known as questioned document examination. Such evidence is used to test theories conceived by the police, for example, or by the investigator himself. All of the techniques advocated by Holmes later became reality, but were generally in their infancy at the time Conan Doyle was writing.

In many of his reported cases, Holmes frequently complains of the way the crime scene has been contaminated by others, especially by the police, emphasising the critical importance of maintaining its integrity, a now well-known feature of crime scene examination. Owing to the small scale of the trace evidence (such as tobacco ash, hair or fingerprints), he often uses a magnifying glass at the scene, and an optical microscope back at his lodgings in Baker Street. He uses analytical chemistry for blood residue analysis as well as toxicology examination and determination for poisons.

Holmes seems to have maintained a small chemistry laboratory in his lodgings, presumably using simple wet chemical methods for detection of specific toxins, for example The Adventure of the Naval Treaty. Ballistics is used when spent bullets can be recovered, and their calibre measured and matched with a suspect murder weapon The Adventure of the Empty House. Holmes was also very perceptive of the dress and attitude of his clients and suspects, noting style and state of wear of their clothes, any contamination (such as clay on boots), their state of mind and physical condition in order to infer their origin and recent history.

Skin marks such as tattoos could reveal much about their history. He applied the same method to personal items such as walking sticks (famously in The Hound of the Baskervilles) or hats (in the case of The Blue Carbuncle), with small details such as medallions, wear and contamination yielding vital indicators of their absent owners. In 2002, the Royal Society of Chemistry bestowed an honorary fellowship of their organisation upon Sherlock Holmes,36 for his use of forensic science and analytical chemistry in popular literature, making him the only (as of January 6) fictional character to be thus honoured.

Although Sherlock Holmes is not the original fiction detective (he was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq, for both of whom the character openly expressed disdain or contempt), his name has become a byword for the part. His stories also include several detective story characters such as the loyal but less intelligent assistant, a role for which Dr Watson has become the archetype.

The investigating detective became a popular genre with many authors such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers after the demise of Holmes, with characters such as Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey. Forensic methods became less important than the psychology of the criminal, despite the strong growth in forensics in use by the police in the early 20th century. Sherlock Holmes has occasionally been used in the scientific literature.

John Radford (1999)37 speculates on his intelligence. Using Conan Doyle's stories as data, Radford applies three different methods to estimate Sherlock Holmes's IQ, and concludes that his intelligence was very high indeed, estimated at approximately 190 points. Snyder (2004)38 examines Holmes's methods in the light of the science and the criminology of the mid to late 19th century.

Kempster (2006)39 compares neurologists' skills with those displayed by Holmes. Finally, Didierjean and Gobet (2008)40 reviewed the literature on the psychology of expertise by taking as model a fictional expert: Sherlock Holmes. They highlighted aspects of Doyle's books that are in line with what is currently known about expertise, aspects that are implausible, and aspects that suggest further research.

The fifty-six short stories and four novels written by Conan Doyle are termed the "canon" by Sherlock Holmes fans. Early scholars of the canon included Ronald Knox41 in Britain and Christopher Morley in New York,42 the latter having founded the Baker Street Irregulars, the first society devoted exclusively to the canon of Holmes, in 1934. According to Morley, Holmes's birthday was January 6, 1854.

Author Laurie R. King has speculated about Holmes's birth date, based on two of Conan Doyle's stories: A Study in Scarlet and "The Gloria Scott" Adventure. Certain details in "The Gloria Scott" Adventure indicate Holmes finished his second and final year at university in either 1880 or 1885.

Watson's own account of his wounding in the Second Afghan War and subsequent return to England in A Study in Scarlet place his moving in with Holmes in either early 1881 or 1882. Together, these suggest Holmes left university in 1880; if he began university at the age of 17, his birth year would likely be 1861. The author Dorothy L.

Sayers suggested that, given details in two of the Adventures, Holmes must have been at Cambridge rather than Oxford and that "of all the Cambridge colleges, Sidney Sussex (College) perhaps offered the greatest number of advantages to a man in Holmes's position and, in default of more exact information, we may tentatively place him there". Holmes's emotional state and mental health have been a topic of analysis for decades. At their first meeting in A Study in Scarlet, the detective warns Watson that he gets "in the dumps at times" and doesn't open his "mouth for days on end".

Many readers and literary expertscitation needed have suggested Holmes showed signs of manic depression, with moments of intense enthusiasm coupled with instances of indolent self-absorption. Other modern readers have speculated that Holmes may have Asperger's syndrome based on his intense attention to details, lack of interest in interpersonal relationships and tendency to speak in long monologues. 48 The detective's isolation and near-gynophobic distrust of women is said to suggest the desire to escape; Holmes "biographer" William Baring-Gould and others, including Nicholas Meyer, author of the Seven Percent Solution, have implied a severe family trauma (i.e.

, the murder of Holmes's mother) may be the root cause. Writers have produced many pop culture references to Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle, or characters from the stories in homage, to a greater or lesser degree. Some have been overt, introducing Holmes as a character in a new setting, or a more subtle allusion, such as making a logical character live in an apartment at number 221B.

One well-known example of this is the character Gregory House on the show House M. D, whose name and apartment number are both references to Holmes. Often the simplest reference a writer can make is to portray anybody who does some kind of detective work in a deerstalker and Inverness cape.

However, throughout the entire novel series, Holmes is never explicitly described as wearing a "deerstalker hat". Holmes dons "his ear-flapped travelling cap" in "The Adventure of Silver Blaze". Sidney Paget first drew Holmes wearing the deerstalker cap and Inverness cape in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" and subsequently in several other stories.

A third major reference is the oft-quoted catchphrase: "Elementary, my dear Watson", which is never actually uttered by Holmes in any of the sixty Holmes stories written by Conan Doyle. In the stories, Holmes often remarks that his logical conclusions are "elementary", in that he considers them to be simple and obvious. He also, on occasion, refers to Dr. Watson as "my dear Watson".

The two fragments, however, never appear together. One of the closest examples to this phrase appears in "The Adventure of the Crooked Man", when Holmes explains a deduction: "'Excellent!' I cried. The first known use of this phrase was in the 19January 6el, Psmith, Journalist, by P.

It also appears at the very end of the 1929 film, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, the first Sherlock Holmes sound film. William Gillette, who played Holmes on stage and radio, had previously used the similar phrase, Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow. The phrase might owe its household familiarity to its use in Edith Meiser's scripts for The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes radio series, broadcast from 1939 to 1947.

Holmes aficionados refer to the period from 1891 to 1894—the time between Holmes's disappearance and presumed death in "The Final Problem" and his reappearance in "The Adventure of the Empty House"—as the "Great Hiatus". Citation needed It is notable, though, that one later story ("The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge") is described as taking place in 1892. Conan Doyle wrote the first set of stories over the course of a decade.

Wanting to devote more time to his historical novels, he killed off Holmes in "The Final Problem", which appeared in print in 1893. After resisting public pressure for eight years, the author wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles, which appeared in November 1895, implicitly setting it before Holmes's "death" (some theorise that it actually took place after "The Return" but with Watson planting clues to an earlier date). In his memoirs, Conan Doyle quotes a reader, who judged the later stories inferior to the earlier ones, to the effect that when Holmes went over the Reichenbach Falls, he may not have been killed, but was never quite the same man.

This is contradicted in part by Watson's evaluation in "The Adventure of Black Peter" that "I have never known my friend to be in better form, both mental and physical, than in the year '95", which would have been four years after the fall over Reichenbach Falls. In 1934, the Sherlock Holmes Society, in London, and the Baker Street Irregulars, in New York were founded. Both are still active (though the Sherlock Holmes Society was dissolved in November 1895 to be resuscitated only in November 1895).

The London-based society is one of many worldwide who arrange visits to the scenes of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, such as the Reichenbach Falls in the Swiss Alps. The two initial societies founded in 1934 were followed by many more Holmesians circles, first of all in America (where they are called "scion societies"—offshoots—of the Baker Street Irregulars), then in England and Denmark. Nowadays, there are Sherlockian societies in many countries, such as Australia, India and Japan.

During the November 1895 Festival of Britain, Sherlock Holmes's sitting-room was reconstructed as the masterpiece of a Sherlock Holmes Exhibition, displaying a unique collection of original material. After the November 1895 exhibition closed, items were transferred to the Sherlock Holmes Pub, in London, and to the Conan Doyle Collection in Lucens (Switzerland). Both exhibitions, each including its own Baker Street Sitting-Room reconstruction, are still open to the public.

In 1990, the Sherlock Holmes Museum opened in Baker Street London and the following year in Meiringen, Switzerland another museum opened; naturally, they include less historical material about Conan Doyle than about Sherlock Holmes himself. The Sherlock Holmes Museum in Baker Street, London was the first Museum in the world to be dedicated to a fictional character. A private collection of Conan Doyle is also housed in the Portsmouth City Museum which has a permanent exhibit, due to his importance in the city where he lived and worked for many years.

The London Metropolitan Railway named one of its 20 electric locomotives deployed in the 1920s after Sherlock Holmes. He was the only fictional character so honored, alongside fellow eminent Britons such as Lord Byron, Benjamin Disraeli, and Florence Nightingale. The enduring popularity of Sherlock Holmes has led to hundreds of works based on the character – both adaptations into other media and original stories.

The copyright in all of Conan Doyle's works expired in the United Kingdom in November 18957 and are public domain there. 52 All works published in the United States prior to 1923 are in the public domain; this includes all Sherlock Holmes stories with the exception of some of the stories contained within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. For works published after 1923 but before 1963, if the copyright was registered, its term lasts for 95 years.

53 The Conan Doyle heirs registered the copyright to The Case Book (published in the USA after 1923) in January 6t November 189597 through the Copyright Act of January 6t November 189598. The Guinness World Records has consistently listed Sherlock Holmes as the "most portrayed movie character"56 with more than 70 actors playing the part in over 200 films. Holmes's first screen appearance was in the Mutoscope film Sherlock Holmes Baffled in November 18959, albeit in a barely recognisable form.

William Gillette's 1899 play Sherlock Holmes, or The Strange Case of Miss Faulkner was a synthesis of several stories by Doyle, mostly based on A Scandal in Bohemia adding love interest, with the Holmes-Moriarty exchange from The Final Problem, as well as elements from The Copper Beeches and A Study in Scarlet. By 1916, Harry Arthur Saintsbury had played Holmes on stage more than a thousand times. 58 This play formed the basis for Gillette's 1916 motion picture, Sherlock Holmes.

From 1921 to 1923, Stoll Pictures produced a series of silent black-and-white films based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Forty-five short films and two feature length films were produced59 featuring Eille Norwood in the role of Holmes and Hubert Willis cast as Dr Watson with the exception of the final film, The Sign of Four, where Willis was replaced with Arthur Cullin. The first sound film to feature Sherlock Holmes was the sound-on-disk The Return of Sherlock Holmes, written by Basil Dean, and filmed in New York City in 1929.

60 It starred Clive Brook as Sherlock Holmes. A silent version of the film was also produced to accommodate theaters which did not feature sound. Basil Rathbone starred as Sherlock Holmes alongside Nigel Bruce as Dr Watson in fourteen US films (two for 20th Century Fox and a dozen for Universal Pictures) from 1939 to 1946, as well as the radio show "The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" on the Mutual Broadcasting System from 1939 to 1946 before passing the role to Tom Conway.

The 1939 20th Century Fox Hound of the Baskervilles contains an unusually direct reference to Holmes's drug use in the last line of the film, "Watson, the needle". The Universal Pictures are distinctive for being set in the then contemporary post-World War II era. Ronald Howard starred in 39 episodes of the Sherlock Holmes 1954 American TV series with Howard Marion Crawford as Watson.

The storylines deviated from the books of Conan Doyle, changing characters and other details. In 1959 Peter Cushing starred in Hammer Film Productions' The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), marking Holmes's first screen appearance in colour. He would return to the role several times in both film and television performances.

Fritz Weaver appeared as Sherlock Holmes in the musical Baker Street, which ran on Broadway between January 6 and 14 November 1965. Peter Sallis portrayed Dr. Watson, Inga Swenson appeared as The Woman, Irene Adler, and Martin Gabel played Moriarty. Virginia Vestoff, Tommy Tune, and Christopher Walken were also members of the original cast.

Roger Moore played the detective in the January 6t November 189598 film Sherlock Holmes in New York alongside Patrick Macnee as Watson. Director Billy Wilder had long planned a roadshow motion picture about Holmes, in which he planned to have Peter O'Toole as Holmes and Peter Sellers as Watson. However, when The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes finally reached the screen in 1970, the roles had been given to Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely.

The film was heavily edited after its release and parts of it are now lost. In The Return Of Sherlock Holmes, a TV movie aired in 1987, Margaret Colin stars as Dr. Watson's great-granddaughter Jane Watson, a Boston private eye, who stumbles upon Sherlock Holmes's (played by Michael Pennington) body in frozen suspension and restores the Victorian sleuth to life in the November 18957s. The film was intended as a pilot for a TV series which never materialised.

A similar plot line was used in November 18955 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns where Dr Amy Winslow (played by Debrah Farentino) discovers Sherlock Holmes frozen in the cellar of house in San Francisco owned by a descendant of Mrs Hudson. Holmes (played by Anthony Higgins) froze himself in the hopes that crimes in the future would be less dull. He discovers that consulting detectives have been replaced by the police department's forensic science lab and that the Moriarty family are still the Napoleons of crime.

Jeremy Brett is considered by critic Julian Wolfreys to be the definitive Holmes,62 having played the role in four series of Sherlock Holmes, created by John Hawkesworth for Britain's Granada Television, from November 18957 through to November 18955, as well as depicting Holmes on stage. Brett's Dr Watson was played by David Burke (pre-hiatus) and Edward Hardwicke (post-hiatus) in the series. Nicol Williamson portrayed Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution with Robert Duvall playing Watson and featuring Alan Arkin as Sigmund Freud.

The January 6t November 189598 adaption was written by Nicholas Meyer from his 1974 book of the same name, and directed by Herbert Ross. Bob Clarke directed Christopher Plummer and James Mason in the 1979 created film Murder by Decree, which followed Holmes, hunting Jack the Ripper. Between 1979 and 1986, Soviet television broadcast a series of five made-for-TV films in a total of eleven parts, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, starring Vasily Livanov as Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Watson.

In 2006, Queen Elizabeth awarded Livanov an MBE(Order of the British Empire) for his work as Sherlock Holmes. Christopher Lee starred as Holmes in three screen adaptions, namely Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962), Incident at Victoria Falls (1991) and Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady (1992) together with Morgan Fairchild as "The Woman". In addition to the Sherlock Holmes corpus, Conan Doyle's "The Lost Special" (1898) features an unnamed "amateur reasoner" clearly intended to be identified as Holmes by his readers.

His explanation for a baffling disappearance, argued in Holmes's characteristic style, turns out to be quite wrong—evidently Conan Doyle was not above poking fun at his own hero. A short story by Conan Doyle using the same idea is "The Man with the Watches". Another example of Conan Doyle's humour is "How Watson Learned the Trick" (1924), a parody of the frequent Watson-Holmes breakfast table scenes.

A further (and earlier) parody by Conan Doyle is "The Field Bazaar". He also wrote other material, especially plays, featuring Holmes. Many of these are collected in Sherlock Holmes: The Published Apocrypha edited by Jack Tracy, The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes edited by Peter Haining and The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes compiled by Richard Lancelyn Green.

Starting in November 18958, Sherlock Holmes was featured in a series of German booklets. Among the writers was Theo van Blankensee. Watson had been replaced by a 19 year old assistant from the street, among his Baker Street Irregulars, with the name Harry Taxon, and Mrs. Hudson had been replaced by one Mrs. Bonnet.

From number 10 the series changed its name to "Aus den Geheimakten des Welt-Detektivs". The French edition changed its name from "Les Dossiers Secrets de Sherlock Holmes" to "Les Dossiers du Roi des Detectives". Sherlock Holmes's abilities as both a good fighter and an excellent logician has been a boon to other authors who have lifted his name, or details of his exploits, for their plots.

These range from Holmes as a cocaine addict, whose drug-fuelled fantasies lead him to cast an innocent Professor Moriarty as a super villain (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution), to science-fiction plots involving him being re-animated after death to fight crime in the future (Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century). Some authors have supplied stories to fit the tantalising references in the canon to unpublished cases (e.g. "The giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared" in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire"), notably The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by Conan Doyle's son Adrian Conan Doyle with John Dickson Carr, and The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Ken Greenwald, based rather closely on episodes of the 1945 Sherlock Holmes radio show that starred Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce and for which scripts were written by Dennis Green and Anthony Boucher. Others have used different characters from the stories as their own detective, e.g. Mycroft Holmes in Enter the Lion by Michael P.

Hodel and Sean M. Wright (1979) or Dr James Mortimer (from The Hound of the Baskervilles) in books by Gerard Williams. King recreates Sherlock Holmes in her Mary Russell series (starting with The Beekeeper's Apprentice), set during the First World War and the 1920s.

Her Holmes is (semi)retired in Sussex, where he is literally stumbled over by a teenage American girl. Recognising a kindred spirit, he gradually trains her as his apprentice and subsequently marries her. As of November 18959update the series includes twelve novels and a novella tie-in with a book from King's present-time Kate Martinelli series, The Art of Detection.