Arthur Conan Doyle, Creator of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, eventually studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, and built his writerly ambitions there. He published his first short story when he was only 20 and still deep in his medical training. He achieved his Doctor of Medicine in 1885 and continued professional studies as he continued to write and write and write. In 1886 he sold A Study in Scarlet, featuring a detective who was based on an instructor he had in medical school. It was published a year later, and the definition of what constituted a mystery in Western fiction began to be forever changed.
Within a few years of the debut of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle was ready to kill him off and move on to his many other projects, thus betraying a pattern of never quite understanding what was best for himself as a writer. Eventually, however, Holmes and Watson were featured in 56 short stories and 4 novels. The tension between rationality and suspense, between dissection and animation, was a powerful creative drive for Doyle. Sometimes he doesn’t seem to have understood it, and sometimes it is captured perfectly, flawlessly. It has been a gift to over a century of other writers, those who work within the canon’s inspiration and those who push back in various ways.
Doyle kept writing his science fiction and his beloved historical novels as he nailed down immortality with Sherlock Holmes. We carry what we can of what is in print. He is a good writer for that bridge age between YA and adult literature, by the way. And the comfort of his storytelling style, even when one thrills to the Hound of the Baskervilles all over again, makes him a writer for all ages and tastes and backgrounds. Enjoy!
A Study in Scarlet [Oxford World Classics edition]
A Study in Scarlet [Oxford World Classics edition]
"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life."
In Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet a popular cultural phenomenon is born. We meet two of the most famous characters in modern literary history: the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, an army doctor home on sick leave, for the first time. Through Watson we learn a little about the eccentric figure who is his new room-mate at 221B Baker Street, before they encounter their first case: an American visitor to the city has been killed in an empty house off the Brixton Road, and the only clue the police have is the mysterious word 'Rache', scrawled in blood-red letters on the wall. As Holmes sets to work with his unique forensic methods, behind the murder a tangled skein of love, religion, and revenge gradually unwinds, taking us from the streets of London to the Utah Territory, and back again.
As Nicholas Daly's Introduction describes, out of this gripping tale grew the Holmes and Watson stories that would make Conan Doyle the best-paid author of his time. His creations have become household words, inspiring not only countless adaptations and imitations, but a Sherlock Holmes museum, Sherlock Holmes-themed pubs, and a whole array of Holmesian merchandise, from cushions to jigsaw puzzles. Here, though, we meet Holmes and Watson before they became famous, and we can see how their extraordinary impact on our popular culture derives from the late-Victorian world from which they emerge.