Sherlock Holmes 1st Published
The 31st of October 1892 AD
Arthur Conan Doyle’s greatest character, Sherlock Holmes, had first seen the light of day in Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887, within the short novel A Study in Scarlet, but it was not until five years later that The Adventures of Sherlock Homes was first published by George Newnes.
Conan Doyle never hid the fact that the inspiration for the great detective came from one of his Edinburgh medical contacts, Dr Joseph Bell, whose party piece was extrapolation from observation of details of say a person’s clothing to their profession, what they had been doing and so forth. Bell was even credited with assisting the police in several cases in Scotland.
Holmes was of course a runaway success, indeed Conan Doyle had already given up his medical practice in London prior to the Adventures being published, such was the demand for Holmes short stories by magazines. For A study in Scarlet Conan Doyle received just £25 for all rights, but he fared rather better from subsequent publications, becoming very comfortable from his writings (which included other less famous characters such as Brigadier Gerard, and wonderful tales such as The Lost World). He is said to have grown to loathe Holmes, killing him off once – though not with such finality that he could not be brought back after a decent interval, but managed to endure him such that the last story was written in 1927, 40 years after the first.
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