Biography
Join us as we meet some of Sherlock Holmes's predecessors and successors, on page and screen, and find out who the real person was on whom Arthur Conan Doyle based the great sleuth
The Basics
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous creation, the private detective Sherlock Holmes, is one of those literary figures who have become known throughout the world. To many, he is the archetypal English character – calm, rational, a little arrogant, and capable of seeing through whatever fog of deception arises before him.
Detective Fiction before Holmes
Detective fiction was invented in the 1840s by Edgar Allan Poe, the great American mystery writer. Poe's Parisian detective, C Auguste Dupin, was a huge influence on Arthur Conan Doyle. Soon after their first meeting, in "A Study In Scarlet", Dr Watson says to Sherlock Holmes, "You remind me of Edgar Poe's Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of the stories."
The Detective Novel since Holmes
The literary genre that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle helped to establish was to become one of the most popular types of fiction of modern times. Not long before Conan Doyle’s final Holmes collection appeared ("The Case-Book Of Sherlock Holmes", 1927), a young aspiring writer who had worked as a nurse during the first world war had her first detective story published.
Foreign Detectives
Looking further afield in the annals of 20th-century detective fiction, the main Continental rival to the English detective was Commissaire Jules Maigret, the creation of Belgian writer Georges Simenon. Maigret himself is a Frenchman, born in the Muscadet wine region, whose approach to crime-solving involves a mixture of deduction and intuition, accompanied by much meditative puffing on a distinctly Holmesian pipe.
Joseph Bell, a Model for Sherlock Holmes
Doyle partly based the character of Sherlock Holmes on Dr Joseph Bell (1837-1911), professor of clinical surgery at Edinburgh University. As a young medical student in the 1870s, Doyle worked for Dr Bell as his out-patient clerk in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Like Sherlock Holmes, Bell was lean and dark, with piercing grey eyes and a nose like an eagle's beak. He also had astonishing powers of observation and deduction.
