SHERLOCK HOLMES

See Also: JAMES BOND MOVIES; DETECTIVE FICTION; FORENSICS Origins; LEARNED SOCIETIES The Royal Institution of Great Britain, Phenomenon Young; LITERATURE; THE POLICE

In 1891 Arthur Conan Doyle was practising as a physician at No. 2 Devonshire Place. As a newcomer to the district, he had relatively few patients. He used the time between appointments to write what proved to be the first of his Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle had read a number of detective stories. In these, the crime was usually solved as the result of chance. He decided to replace luck with scientific deduction. He based the detective upon both the person of Dr Joseph Bell, who had taught him medicine at Edinburgh University, and the character c. Auguste Dupin, the French detective whom Edgar Allen Poe had created in the story The Murders In The Rue Morgue (1841). Holmes fused sensationalism and science, while raising deduction to a new level. However, the first story was rejected by a series of publishers prior to its eventual acceptance.

Doyle s second most successful series was composed of his Professor Challenger novels (1912-29). These featured a hero who was modelled upon his friend the journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson. The two men had first met one another in July 1900 onboard a troop ship while they had been returning from the Second Boer War. It was Robinson who had told the writer the tale of the Black Shuck. This became the basis for The Hound of The Baskervilles (1902).

In 1902 Doyle was knighted in acknowledgement of the propaganda work that he had performed during the conflict. He came to the view that Holmes was overshadowing his other works, such as his historical sagas The White Company (1891) and the epistolary novel A Duet, With An Occasional Chorus (1899). The following year he killed off the character at the Reichenbach Falls. Workers in the City of London took to wearing mourning crêpe on their top hats. The Strand magazine lost 20,000 subscribers.

Location: 2 Devonshire Place, W1G 6HJ (red, yellow)

The Sherlock Holmes, 11 Northumberland Street, WC2N 5DA. The pub has a collection of items that are associated with Conan Doyle and his most popular literary creation. The material is reputed to be a vestige of the Festival of Britain of 1951.¹ (grey, turquoise)

Sherlock Mews, W1U 6DS (purple, orange)

12 Tennison Road, South Norwood, SE25 5RT

2 Upper Wimpole Street, W1G 6LD. A plaque at the address was unveiled by Dame Jean Conan Doyle in 1994. (red, blue)

¹. The original name of The Sherlock Holmes was The Northumberland Arms. The great Percy townhouse Northumberland House occupied what is now Northumberland Avenue.

Baker Street

No. 221b Baker Street was the supposed residence of Sherlock Holmes. It is reputed that the Abbey bank, which for many years occupied a site that included No. 221 Baker Street, employed a person to reply to the detective's correspondence.

Location: 221 Baker Street, NW1 6XE (red, yellow)

The Conan Doyle Estate

Despite the Holmes stories being out of copyright, the Conan Doyle Estate authorises Holmes novels - Anthony Horowitz's The House of Silk (2011) and Gareth Rubin's Holmes and Moriarty (2024).

Edinburgh

Edinburgh infused Conan Doyle's understanding of London. To some Scots, the Holmes stories feel as though they are set in Edinburgh.

Mycroft Holmes

In 1888, in the wake of the Ripper murders, the American publisher of Lippincott s Magazine introduced Wilde to Conan Doyle at The Langham Hotel. They took to each other. It prompted Wilde to write The Picture of Dorian Grey.

In 1892 the pair, Bram Stokers, Robert Louis Stevenson, Willie Hornam, and J.M. Barrie all had dinner together.

There is a theory that Conan Doyle based Holmes's older brother Mycroft upon Oscar Wilde, giving him the Irishman's size, lethargy,¹ and Hellenism as characteristics.

Location: The Langham Hotel, 1c Portland Place, W1B 1JA (blue, white)

See Also: THE NAPOLEON OF CRIME; OSCAR WILDE

¹. Doyle was sportif.

The Name's Origins

There is a theory that the detective's name was derived from two cricketers - Shaklock of Nottinghamshire and Holmes of Yorkshire.

The Sherlock Holmes Society of London

In 2008 The Sherlock Holmes Society of London issued the two volume Holmes and Watson Country: Travels In Search of Solutions. The publication was the first collection of Holmesian writing.

Website: www.sherlock-holmes.org.uk

Visual Afterlife

In 1899 the American actor William Gillete (1853-1937) became the first Holmes in a theatre. It was he who initiated using the pipe as a motif.

The magnifying glass was probably used to symbolise the search for clues.

David Backhouse 2024