Utechin - Sherlock Holmes

There has not been a fictional character like Sherlock Holmes in the history of popular writing. Indeed, it is likely that a good proportion of those who have heard the name do not even know that he is a fictional character. I dont know how many times I have sat in a coach coming into London and, as the driver announces that his first stop will be in Baker Street, heard at least one person inform their companion that Sherlock Holmes used to live there. Tourists walk up and down the street every day, seeking out that famous address of 221B.

The very name of Sherlock Holmes has entered the English language. Whenever you come across the much-used phrase about the dog that didnt bark, you may not know that it derives from a Holmes story. Although he never actually said it in any of the stories, the phrase Elementary, my dear Watson! is an immediate reference to the great consulting detective.

The deerstalker (invented for the character by one of his illustrators) and the curved pipe (brought to his lips by an actor) are immediately recognisable as the symbols for Holmes. He may have been created in the late 19th century, but the nine books containing his adventures have never been out of print. New generations of followers (called Holmesians in Britain and Sherlockians in the USA) are introduced all the time, not least because of the immense successes of the films starring Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law, and the reincarnation for the 21st century that is Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as televisions Sherlock and his friend John. Moreover, there are Sherlock Holmes societies all over the world.

Yet it was Arthur Conan Doyle who created and developed the characters of Holmes, Dr Watson, Mycroft Holmes, housekeeper Mrs Hudson and the Napoleon of Crime, Professor James Moriarty. It was Conan Doyle who invented two of the creepiest stories ever written: The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventure of the Speckled Band. It was Conan Doyle who formed the partnership of Holmes and Watson that is at the heart of the long-standing success of the 56 short stories and the 4 longer ones.

It was also Conan Doyle who made his creations so believable and the Victorian and Edwardian world in which they lived so real that a whole form of pseudo-scholarship has grown up around them: a game, the writer Dorothy L. Sayers said in 1946, that must be played as seriously as a county cricket match at Lords; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere. What this means is: forget that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character and treat him as you would a real one. That means people can choose which university he attended, or how many wives Watson had or whether Holmes actually set out to murder Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.

Conan Doyle would have been amazed at the longevity of his characters: when he wanted to kill Holmes off, he wrote to his mother that he takes my mind from better things. When the American actor William Gillette wanted to write a play based on the detective, he wrote to Conan Doyle asking if he might marry Holmes. The author famously replied: You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him. Arguably, that gave the green light to all the pastiches that have placed Holmes with such people as Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt, sent him off to Dallas to investigate Kennedys assassination and to Whitechapel to confront Jack the Ripper.

No fictional character has so often been thrust on to the big screen than Sherlock Holmes. BBC radio has dramatised every single story, with the same two leading actors. The character has been used in advertisements from Frys Cocoa to Air India, via Kalamazoo Gas Appliances and the New York Stock Exchange. There is a plaque commemorating the meeting of Holmes and Watson in Barts Hospital in London and a statue of the Great Detective outside Baker Street Underground Station. And it all started in Southsea, Hampshire, in 1886.

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born at a house in Picardy Place, Edinburgh, on 22 May 1859. His birthplace was pulled down in later years, but a commemorative statue was unveiled in 1991, of Sherlock Holmes rather than Conan Doyle, a perfect example of how the created has triumphed over the creator.

His father was Charles Altamont Doyle; his mother was Mary Foley she was to bear nine children. Although the author is universally referred to as Conan Doyle, Doyle was his actual surname, Conan being a family name. Doyle Senior worked from the age of 19 for the Scottish Office of Works as an architectural draughtsman, but was an alcoholic and an epileptic. It was one of the great tragedies of Arthur Conan Doyles life that he had to commit his own father to an asylum. However despite the guilt he may have felt, he paid a form of tribute to his father years later when he gave Sherlock Holmes the pseudonym of Altamont in the story His Last Bow.

His mother, on the other hand, was to be a huge influence on Conan Doyle until the end of her life. My real love for letters, Conan Doyle wrote, my instinct for storytelling, springs from my mother who is of Anglo-Celtic stock, with the glamour and romance of the Celt very strongly marked. In my early childhood, as far back as I can remember, the vivid stories she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life. Mary Doyle lived until 1920 and some 1,000 letters to her from her son exist.

Charles Altamont Doyle

It was necessary for Conan Doyles mother to take in lodgers because of her husbands situation (see ), but money was available for her sons education. Conan Doyle was first sent to Hodder, an English Catholic preparatory school in Lancashire, and then on to Stonyhurst, a Jesuit foundation also in Lancashire.

He was to question the religious side of this education, but discovered that he could entrance his fellow students by telling stories: On a wet half-holiday I have been elevated on to a desk, and with an audience of little boys all squatting on the floor, with their chins upon their hands, I have talked myself husky over the misfortunes of my heroes. During his time at Stonyhurst from 1868 to 1875, his favourite books were The Water Witch by Fennimore Cooper, The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade and Sir Walter Scotts Ivanhoe.

It is likely that his schooldays influenced his later writings, and it is delightful to note that among those who arrived at the school with Conan Doyle was one Patrick Sherlock. Also at school with the author were two brothers from Ireland, Michael and John Moriarty; Michael was a fine mathematician whose surname and mathematical skill echo the character Professor James Moriarty in the stories. Furthermore, during the Christmas holidays in 1874, Conan Doyle was taken to see the waxwork show originally mounted by Madame Tussaud in London; it was not yet in Marylebone Road, but just around the corner, in Baker Street.