1. In 2001 a statue was erected in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's honour in Crowborough, East Sussex, where he spent the last 23 years of his life with second wife Jean.

2. Holmes has appeared on a number of stamps around the world, including Nicaragua, San Marino, Britain, Canada and South Africa.

3. Doyle's name has been linked to the Piltdown Man hoax of 1912 - a combination of a human skull fragment and orang-utan jaw, stained to look ancient - which for 40 years fooled the scientific world into thinking it was an early human fossil. In the 1980s and 1990s it was claimed Doyle had a motive (revenge on the scientific establishment for debunking one of his favourite psychics); he also lived near the East Sussex village of Piltdown, where the bones were found in a gravel pit, and he was a man who loved hoaxes and adventure. Doyle's classic dinosaur adventure The Lost World is said to contain clues that he was responsible (for example, one character says "if you are clever and you know your business you can fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph". On the other hand, the Piltdown Man could have been inspired by the plot of The Lost World…

4. In 1953, Sherlock Holmes was the subject of a ballet, The Great Detective, staged at Sadler's Wells in London and featuring a score by Richard Arnell.

5. Three of the Holmes stories are about crimes in West Sussex, an area Doyle would have been familiar with: The Five Orange Pips, The Musgrave Ritual and The Sussex Vampire.

6. On July 8 1989, Leslie Bricusse's Sherlock Holmes - The Musical was staged at the Cambridge Theatre, London. The show, starring Ron Moody, got such terrible reviews that it closed after just one performance. In 1993, the Bristol Old Vic revived the show with Robert Powell in the title role. This production, which was much more successful, went on to tour the UK.

7. In  2002 Sherlock Holmes received a posthumous Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Society of Chemistry - 100 years after he returned from the dead to solve the case of The Hound Of The Baskervilles. Holmes is the first fictional character to receive such an honours - it is usually reserved for distinguished academics and industrialists.

8. There is a Sherlock Holmes-themed pub inside a hotel in Manama, Bahrain. Popular with both locals and expats, the Sherlock Holmes at the Gulf Hotel is adorned with Holmes memorabilia and even boasts an original red British telephone box outside.

9. Holmes appears in the hit children's TV show Seasame Street - as spoof version Sherlock Hemlock, the world's greatest detective. His assistant, Watson, is a dog who often solves the case long before Hemlock, but is unable to communicate this to his master.

10. To many of his fans, Holmes is too real to be confined to the pages of a book. People the world over address their problems to him at 221B Baker Street - and Abbey National, occupants of the site from 1932 to 2002, employed a secretary to deal with the correspondence. The mail is now delivered to the neighbouring Sherlock Holmes Museum.