The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

In 1894 Conan Doyle published
Round the Red Lamp
, a collection of short stories with a medical theme; in 1895
The Stark Munro Letters
, an autobiographical novel; and in 1896
The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard
, set in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1900 he traveled to South Africa in the capacity of war-time physician in Cape Town; his treatise on the Boer War earned him a knighthood in 1902. That same year Conan Doyle published
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, set before the story that had finished Holmes off in 1893. In 1903 new Holmes stories started to appear in the
Strand
.

In the coming years, Conan Doyle produced more popular books on a variety of subjects, including three new collections of stories—
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
(1905),
His Last Bow
(1917), and
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes
(1927)—plus a final Holmes novel,
The Valley of Fear
(1915). Among many other non-Holmes projects were the three Challenger novels, historical fiction and nonfiction, and several books on spiritualism. He also championed the rights of the wrongly accused, in two separate cases exonerating innocent men.

With the onset of World War I, Conan Doyle served as a war correspondent on several major European battlefields. Following the war, he became a passionate advocate of spiritualism, which he embraced in part to communicate with his eldest son, Kingsley, who had died from influenza aggravated by war wounds. From 1920 until his death, the author wrote, traveled, and lectured to promote his belief in a spiritual life after the death of the body. After a long, demanding journey through Scandinavia, Arthur Conan Doyle suffered a heart attack; he died a few months later, on July 7, 1930, in Sussex.

THE WORLD OF SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AND
SHERLOCK HOLMES

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived an interesting life by any standard. As a young ship’s surgeon he sailed the Arctic in a whaling ship, and later he steamed down the west coast of Africa on a cargo vessel. In midlife his fame as a writer opened doors all over the world. He showed some finer points of golf to Rudyard Kipling in a Vermont field, and argued in the newspapers with his neighbor, Bernard Shaw, about the
Titanic
. He climbed the top of the Great Pyramid in Giza, and lectured the deacons in the Great Mormon Tabernacle in Utah. As a champion of spiritualism he proclaimed that a pharaoh’s curse could indeed have caused the death of Lord Carnarvon, the patron of the Tutankhamun expedition, and assured the public that Agatha Christie, who had mysteriously disappeared, would show up safe and sound because a psychic to whom he had taken one of her gloves predicted it. He was knighted by King Edward VII for writing a pamphlet justifying the British cause in the Boer War. He wrote what he thought were important historical novels in the manner of Sir Walter Scott and through them hoped to establish his legacy. Ironically enough, all these events have a chance to be remembered only because he also created what he regarded as “a lower stratum of literary achievement,” his peerless detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes has become as famous as any character in literature. His name is synonymous with brilliant deduction. Call someone “Sherlock” and everyone knows what you mean. The stories have been in print continuously since the time the first one,
A Study in Scarlet
, was published in 1887. In addition Holmes has been the leading character in hundreds of plays, films, and television shows. He made his debut in films even before Conan Doyle had finished writing the stories. Long before Basil Rath-bone and Nigel Bruce created their memorable roles of Holmes and Watson in films of the late 1930s and the 1940s, the celebrated sleuth had already been played by a host of actors on stage and screen. The stories continue to be filmed today. You have probably seen one of the excellent Granada Television episodes with Jeremy Brett, which may well be the reason you are reading this book.

Sherlock Holmes has such a strong hold on the popular imagination that he is no longer moored to the books in which he first appeared. Not satisfied by the fifty-six short stories and four novellas of the Holmes canon, writers first adopted the character by completing cases Dr. Watson had mentioned only in passing. Soon they constructed new episodes for the master detective. Film directors followed suit. Though many films have been scrupulously true to the plots of the stories, some have created their own plots. Such films include
Young Sherlock Holmes
(1985), which invented a childhood for the detective. In it Holmes and Watson meet as teenagers at a boarding school where Professor Moriarty, Holmes’s great nemesis in the books, is an encouraging teacher. It also introduces a love interest for Holmes, a young girl whose death at the hands of Moriarty, who turns into a deadly foe, explains why Holmes was never the marrying kind.
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
(1976) sends Holmes to Vienna to meet Sigmund Freud, who traces Holmes’s obsession with Moriarty to a repressed memory of his mother in the arms of the professor. In perhaps the boldest reimagining of the stories, and certainly the most amusing,
Without a Clue
(1988) reveals that Watson was the real detective genius and that Holmes was his fictional creation; when the public clamored to meet Holmes, Watson hired a dim-witted actor to play the role.

So powerful is the Holmes persona that even tangential connections attract viewers. In 2000 and 2002 the Public Broadcasting System aired a joint British-American series of mysteries that featured Conan Doyle and his teacher, Dr. Joseph Bell, on whom Holmes was partly modeled, as characters solving crimes in the manner of Holmes and Watson. Called
Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes
, the episodes weave incidents from Conan Doyle’s life into fictional plots that foreshadow the great stories to come. But clearly the draw for the series is the name of the immortal detective.