No, with Conan Doyle’s quarry squarely in his sights, this was something different. Unlike the other stories, there was no problem to be solved, no helpless individual wrongly accused, no clues, no denouement. In December 1893, six years after the first Holmes story, The Final Problem was published. In the end, he realised he had no choice: to live once more he had to kill his creation. Increasingly, Conan Doyle was dismayed by the seeming paradox of his success: in the minds of readers the more real Holmes became, the less the author seemed to exist. Holmes had become more than a character: he had taken on a life of his own. It was not only the writer’s art that was suffering, though. Try as he might, Conan Doyle just couldn’t escape from the shadow cast by the figure at the window of 221b Baker Street. He was to spend years researching historical novels, convinced that they would at last earn him the respect of the literary world, only to find all he did obscured by The Great Detective. Moreover, he feared that the detective stories were eclipsing his attempts at more serious literary endeavours. Holmes had first appeared in 1887, but by the early 1890s his creator was finding the churning out of plot twists and devices as tedious as the character he had created. Having been brought up a Catholic, he had rejected the faith of his ancestors by young adulthood preferring instead science and, ominously, various aspects of the occult.Īs is well known Conan Doyle had had enough of his most famous creation from quite early on. One of those who dwelt in the shadows of that now famous street was the man who created its world: Jesuit educated, Hiberno-Scot, Conan Doyle. If this sounds hyperbolic, then the press clippings of a tragic case from ten years ago may give food for thought. And, for some, the strange inexorable pull of 221b Baker Street has ended with lives twisted by an obsession with the Great Detective and the darkness that collects around him. I write ‘of sorts’ because in the presence of Holmes’ mesmerizing personality it is all too easy to lose sight of what is real and what is not. Joseph Bell, and he did help with police enquires, but the rest was only a fiction of sorts. Indeed there was a real life model for Holmes, Dr. Watson’s literary agent”-insisting it was all really ‘true’. Some admirers have been known to change from a position of interest to one of preoccupation and then to belief, at this point, referring to his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, merely as “Dr. The detective’s cold logical machine of a mind has an appeal that can become unhealthy. Like his cocaine habit, however, it can become addictive. Of course, the “problem” with Holmes was, and is, his personality. Permanently shrouded in late autumnal fog, it was there its occupants heard the inevitable knock upon the door from some unseen hand, followed by Mrs Hudson’s bustle on the stairs, before another door opened and … the game was afoot, then off on a steam enveloped train to the Home Counties, bound for some “sinister” country house that hid its wrongdoing better than London’s slums ever could. A kind of psychic center to which all the Empire’s evil flooded. Watson, and the starting point to many adventures. That address: 221b Baker Street, as famous as it was unreal, the residence of Holmes, and occasionally his friend Dr.
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