Doyle vs. Holmes
1893 AD
1893 1893
08.15E46.44N
LIT

THE ALPS, SWITZERLAND
	Sherlock Holmes stood on the slippery edge of Reichenbach Falls locked in a deadly embrace with his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty. But it was not just Moriarty who sought his death.
	When the news came out that the great detective had plunged to his death the public was furious -- but not at Moriarty.
	At whom, then?  At Holmes creator, Arthur Conan Doyle.
	In 1893 Doyle wrote the story of Holmes' tragic end in "The Final Problem" hoping to free himself from the constant demands for more and more Sherlock Holmes stories.  He wanted time for more "serious" writing projects, and for his wife, who was dying of tuberculosis.  However, the fictional detective seemed to have taken on a life of his own, and an immortal one at that.
	At the public's insistence, Doyle resumed his tales of Holmes and his friend Dr. Watson with the famous 1902 thriller, "The Hound of the Baskervilles."  This story supposedly took place before Holmes' last battle with Moriarty.  A year later Holmes appeared in a new series of stories after revealing to Watson that he had escaped death at the falls in Switzerland.
	Doyle based Holmes on one of his medical professors at Edinburgh University.  Dr. Joseph Bell fascinated students by deducing a patient's occupation and other facts about him just by observing him. For example, he would look at the worn places on a man's clothes and the calluses on his hands and conclude that he was a cobbler.  Doyle also described Holmes as tall, dark and thin like Dr. Bell.  Dr. Watson was based on Major Wood, Doyle's faithful secretary for many years.
	When Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear in 1887, detectives were typically uneducated men who relied on their knowledge of underworld characters and criminal practices to do their jobs. The readers of Doyle's day had a great reverence for science, however, so Holmes' scientific methods of detection were often copied by real investigators.  Sherlock Holmes's cases became required reading in a number of European and Asian police forces.
	Probably the best evidence that Holmes' methods worked came from Doyle himself.  He used them to prove that several men accused of crimes were innocent.  Doyle and Holmes pioneered many detective techniques commonly used today.
	However, Doyle had mixed feelings about Holmes' tremendous popularity.  He admitted that Holmes had been "a good friend to me in many ways," but found it hard to accept that he might be remembered primarily as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
	Doyle wrote many other short stories, historical novels, poems, histories, his autobiography, and books about spiritualism, and pursued causes he believed in. For his good works as a citizen of Great Britain, he was made a knight in 1902, becoming Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.