The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [antikvár]

Introduction Sherlock holmes is perhaps the best-known of all fictional characters. From the first appearance of the short stories in the Strand Magazine chronicling his extraordinary deductive powers. Holmes became a larger-than-life figure whose devotees were stricken when it seemed that the great detective had perished at the Reichenbach Falls in The Adventure of the Final Problem. Young men put mourning crepe in their hats, and the author was forced by public demand to resurrect his hero. From that day, a literary cult was bom and continues unabated to this day. Perhaps it is best exemplified by The Baker Street Irregulars, who exist to perpetuate the memory, methods and iconography of the great detective. Its members comprise diplomats, judges, academics as well as great numbers of ordinary readers who enjoy the romance and atmosphere of Conan Doyle's creation. Sherlock Holmes's methods may be traced back to one of Doyle's teachers at the Edinburgh Infirmary. Joseph Bell used to enliven his lectures by encouraging his students to recognise a patient as a left-handed cobbler or as a retired sergeant of a Highland regiment who had served in Barbados, by the simple processes of accurate observation and rational deduction. This inclined Doyle to attribute these qualities to a detective, and to cast that detective as a hero, which was unusual, if not unique, in English stories of the time. The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes was in 1887, in A Study in Scarlet, which was presented as 'a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, late of the Army Medical Department', and so the happy pairing of the deductive Holmes, with the down-to-earth Dr Watson as foil, was established. The Sign of Four followed in 1890, but Holmes did not really catch the public imagination until the first of the short stories, A Scandal in Bohemia, was published in the July issue of The Strand Magazine in 1891. These stories were illustrated by the remarkable Sidney Paget, who used his brother Walter as model for 'the tall, spare figure of Holmes', standing before the Baker Street fireplace, looking down on Watson in his 'singular, introspective fashion'. It was Paget who