Sherlock Holmes- Arthur Conan Doyal
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1990-2004 BOOK SERIES: Irene Adler series by Carole Nelson Douglas (eight books) "The Woman" turns detective in her own right, with cameos by Holmes and Watson.
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1994-present BOOK SERIES: Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King (13 books so far) A retired Sherlock Holmes is pulled back in the mystery world by his apprentice-turned-wife.
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2005 BOOK: "The Italian Secretary" by Caleb Carr Holmes and Watson investigate the mystery of Holyrood Palace in Scotland and try to stop an assassination attempt on Queen Victoria.
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2009, 2011 MOVIES: "Sherlock Holmes," "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Watson (Jude Law) get the Hollywood blockbuster treatment, sequel included.
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2010-present TV SHOW: BBC's "Sherlock" Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and BFF John Watson (Martin Freeman) take modern-day London by storm.
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2011 BOOK: "The House of Silk" by Anthony Horowitz Holmes and Watson uncover a Victorian sex scandal. (This was the first new Sherlock Holmes novel authorized by the Doyle estate.)
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2012-present TV SHOW: CBS' "Elementary" Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) is transplanted to modern-day New York City, and Watson takes a gender-bending turn as Joan (Lucy Liu).
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2014 BOOK: "In the Company of Sherlock Holmes" edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger A collection of stories by 16 contemporary writers inspired by the Holmes canon. (This was the book that prompted the June court decision placing Sherlock Holmes in the public domain.)
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A restless man who loved adventure and physical activity, Conan Doyle took any opportunity to travel. He grew interested in photography and published several articles about it.
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A study in scarlet
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Adventures of the red circle
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After graduation, he struggled to establish a medical practice, since he could not afford to buy one. Although hampered by poverty and his lack of social connections, Conan Doyle achieved a modest success in medicine. His 1885 marriage to Louise Hawkins, the sister of a patient who had died, provided him with a small supplemental income that raised his standard of living.
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Although crime rates in London at the end of the nineteenth century were almost impossibly low by modern standards, London had an aura of darkness and risk that existed simultaneously with its atmosphere of imperial might and constant energy.
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Around the time he obtained his medical degree, Conan DoyleÕs crisis of faith, which had been brewing since his days with the Jesuits, came to a head.
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Arthur Conan Doyle's humble beginnings did not predict his future success. Born on May 22, 1859, to a middle-class, Catholic family, he grew up on Edinburgh's rough-and-tumble streets, far from his successful grandfather and uncles, who hobnobbed with London's intellectual elite. His celebrated grandfather, John Doyle, had reinvented the art of political caricature. John Doyle's eldest son, also named John, became a well-known caricaturist himself, and the second son, Richard, began his career as a successful cartoonist
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Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on May 22, 1859, the third of ten children.
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Arthur's parents, Mary Foley Doyle and Charles Altamont Doyle, had moved to Scotland from London, hoping that Charles could advance his career in architecture
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As Sherlock's fame grew, so did that of his creator. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle frequently received letters appealing for help with crimes. One such letter led Doyle to turn detective himself, and in 1903 his shrewd observations and experience as an eye doctor helped exonerate a man accused of brutally killing animals in a Staffordshire village. Even though Doyle proved the accused innocent, the police refused to believe it. The experience propelled Doyle to become an influential voice in setting up the first official British Court of Appeal two years later.
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As for the stories themselves, you simply can't go wrong in rediscovering or reading Holmes for the first time.
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As the only active parent, Mary Doyle had a strong influence on Arthur, the eldest surviving son of seven children, instilling in him a love of chivalric romances and a firm belief in the English code of honor. She made the boy memorize and recite his family's genealogy, ancestor by ancestor.
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At the age of 9, Doyle bid a tearful goodbye to his parents and was shipped off to England, where he would attend Hodder Place, Stonyhurst—a Jesuit preparatory school—from 1868 to 1870.
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By this time, Charles Doyle had lost his job, and the family had difficulty paying the school fees. A lodger named Bryan Charles Waller became the familyS protector, eventually supporting Mary, Charles, and their children completely.
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Codependent throughout, Holmes and Watson fill each other's needs. Watson provides Holmes with an ego boost, and Holmes needs Watson's eyes and ears to inconspicuously gather clues. Watson is awestruck by Holmes' power of observation, and Watson feels more powerful by association.
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Conan Doyle did not know how to write a dull sentence. Which is a very true statement. Virtually all of these stories are gripping ones, but even the lesser ones -- mainly the ones Conan Doyle wrote toward the end -- are so atmospheric, that your enjoyment is scarcely lessened.
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"Comments." Robot Check. Comments, n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2015
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"The Red-Headed League" captures both sides of London, describing it as both a city of light and a city of darkness.
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"forensic scientists, toxicologists, crime scene investigators and criminal profilers."
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Like the elusive Sherlock Holmes, his most famous creation, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a man of many contradictions.
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Sherlock Holmes - The novel's protagonist. Holmes is the famed 221b Baker Street detective with a keen eye, hawked nose, and the trademark hat and pipe. Holmes is observation and intuition personified, and though he takes a bit of a back seat to Watson in this story, we always feel his presence. It takes his legendary powers to decipher the mystifying threads of the case.
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Sherlock Holmes has had on the development of real criminal investigation and forensic techniques. From blood to ballistics, from fingerprints to footprints, Holmes was 120 years ahead of his time, protecting crime scenes from contamination, looking for minute traces of evidence and searching for what the eye couldn't see.
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Sherlock Holmes is the ever-observant, world-renowned detective of 221b Baker Street. For all his assumed genius and intuition he is virtually omniscient in these stories, and Holmes becomes more accessible in the context of his constant posturing and pretension.
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Sherlock Holmes, a detective who relied on facts and evidence rather than chance.
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The success of the Sherlock Holmes stories can hardly be overstated. Almost single-handedly, Doyle inaugurated two massive changes in literature.
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This collection and it's main character demonstrated how little of what we sense takes part in our deductive reasoning.
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While a medical student, Doyle took his own first stab at writing, with a short story called The Mystery of Sasassa Valley. That was followed by a second story, The American Tale, which was published in London Society
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Nearly 90 years after Arthur Conan Doyle's final story was published, literature's most famous detective has continued solving crimes through the pages of other novels, as well as TV shows and movies—and more might be on the way. U.S. Court of Appeals in June ruled that most of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories no longer are protected by copyright, meaning authors don't need to pay a licensing fee to Doyle's estate to use the character. (Last month, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the decision, ensuring Sherlock remains in the public domain.)
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One of the major elements of "The Red-Headed League" is the story's representation of the dynamic urban world of late-Victorian London. During the course of the nineteenth century, London more than quintupled in population, so it was easily the largest city in the world by 1900. Due to both its sheer size and crooked, irrational layout, many people saw London as fascinating but entirely mysterious and even somewhat dangerous.
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While writing the early Holmes stories, Doyle also began what he considered his most important work: chivalric, historical novels based on British history, primarily, Micah Clark, Sir Nigel, and The White Company. Although these novels were widely admired, none of them created the stir caused by the first series of short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson that appeared in The Strand Magazine, starting in 1891. Despite their overwhelming success, Conan Doyle never suspected that these stories would be the foundation of his literary legacy.
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over a hundred years since publication: they're entertaining, cleverly written, wonderfully detailed, and often edge-of-your-seat thrilling.
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The memories of Sherlock Holmes
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The prison belt
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Doyle became increasingly invested in Spiritualism or "Psychic religion," a belief system that he would later attempt to spread through a series of his written works. By the time he received his Bachelor of Medicine degree in 1881, Doyle had denounced his Roman Catholic faith.
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Doyle had written for his own pleasure up until this point in his life but succeeded in publishing A Study in Scarlet in 1887, a slim novel that introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes.
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Doyle makes fun of such detectives in "The Red-Headed League" when Holmes refers to Detective Jones as a brave man but "an absolute imbecile."
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Doyle wrote another Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four, in 1890, and moved with his wife, Louise, to London in 1891. By this time, Doyle had decided to become an eye doctor, especially because his first two Sherlock Holmes novels had not been financial successes.
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Doyle's first paying job as a doctor took the form of a medical officer's position aboard the steamship Mayumba, travelling from Liverpool to Africa. After his stint on the Mayumba, Doyle settled in Plymouth, England for a time.
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Dr. Watson is the stout sidekick to Holmes and longtime chronicler of the detective's adventures. In Hound, Watson tries his hand at Holmes' game, expressing his eagerness to please and impress the master by solving such a baffling case. As sidekick and apprentice to Holmes, Watson acts as a foil for Holmes' genius and as a stand-in for us, the awestruck audience.
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During Doyle's third year of medical school, he took a ship surgeon's post on a whaling ship sailing for the Arctic Circle. The voyage awakened Doyle's sense of adventure, a feeling that he incorporated into a story, Captain of the Pole Star.
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Early on, he evinced a talent for storytelling, wowing teachers and friends in Jesuit school with his yarns.
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Embraced by the public from his very first appearance in 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's literary creation is more popular than ever, with multiple contemporary film and television series introducing new generations to the detective's keen observations and lightning powers of deduction. Narrated by Andrew Lincoln, How Sherlock Changed the World features dramatized excerpts from several of Doyle's stories, along with scenes from "Sherlock," the MASTERPIECE series starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
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English novelists Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins both wrote novels featuring detectives long before Doyle invented Sherlock Holmes, but their detectives acted more like hyperactive cops than rational professionals.
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Forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee shows how he used blood evidence to free a woman charged with the murder of her husband in a mysterious case in Florida, and Karen Smith demonstrates how blood splatter patterns exonerated Dr. Sam Sheppard of his wife's murder years after his conviction.
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Holmes was the first to use ballistics, including bullet trajectory, as evidence in criminal cases. Long before modern toxicologists developed sophisticated tests for chemical analysis, Holmes was using scientific methods to detect the presence of poisons, which for centuries had been used as an undetectable means for murder. Dr. Michael Rieders reveals how modern toxicology tests were used to unmask the true killer of Robert Curley, a Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania man who died of thallium poisoning.
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Holmes's superior crime-solving strategy, remarking instead that Holmes has the potential to be a good detective. Watson's skepticism of Holmes before readers discover that Holmes was right all along actually lends credence to this new, almost scientific method of solving crimes. Thus Doyle is both playing off the emergence of the detective in public consciousness and trying to stir that same public into demanding more from their police forces.
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Hound of Baskerville
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I love the Sherlock Holmes mysteries and have enjoyed many a bedtime story with the great sleuth,
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I love this collection of all of Sherlock Holmes work. I read a story each evening and enjoy it.
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In Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the world's best known and (arguably) most fully realized literary characters. Since Doyle's death, there have been plenty of people writing knockoffs of his stories. But with rare exceptions (Nicholas Meyer comes to mind), most have not lived up to the high standards Doyle set in at least the best of his Holmes tales.
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In an era when eyewitness testimony and "smoking gun" evidence were needed to convict and police incompetence meant that Jack the Ripper stalked the streets freely, Sherlock Holmes used chemistry, bloodstains and fingerprints to catch offenders.
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In many ways, the modern detective can be seen as a direct extension of Conan Doyle's literary genius. Using interviews and archival materials, How Sherlock Changed the World, explores real crimes that were solved thanks to techniques, equipment or methods of reasoning Holmes used.
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Later in life, when his son was killed in the first World War, Doyle devoted himself to his chosen faith, spiritualism. The notion of life after death and the idea of psychic abilities inform the character of Doyle's famous detective
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Nineteenth-century England witnessed the emergence of the modern police force, and "The Red-Headed League" is one of many Sherlock Holmes stories that familiarized the public with the new business of solving crimes. Modern police forces didn't exist in England until 1829, and even then the police were more concerned with preserving public order than investigating crimes committed by unknown perpetrators.
Bio
On May 22, 1859, Arthur Conan Doyle was born to an affluent, strict Irish-Catholic family in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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Over time, Doyle found solace in his flair for storytelling, and developed an eager audience of younger students.
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Reading the sometimes arcane vocabulary showed me that my use of language was somewhat derived by these turn of the century books I read, as a child.
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Songs of the road
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Tales of terror and mystery
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The adventures of Sherlock Holmes
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The good doctor plays the sidekick to Holmes' self-obsessed hero figure. Watson is a lowly apprentice and live-in friend, who spends most of the book trying to solve a difficult case in his master's stead. Always on hand to stroke Holmes' ego, Watson is nonetheless intent on proving his own mettle by applying Holmes' techniques.
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The great boer war
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The First World War tore apart Conan Doyle's familiar world. Like so many others, he lost close family members to the conflict. Conan Doyle's brother-in-law and nephew died in combat, while the influenza pandemic took his brother Innes and his eldest son Kingsley, weakened by war wounds. During the war, he managed to have himself appointed as an observer for the Foreign Office, but he was kept away from the horrors of the western front for fear that he might reveal to the public things that the military would rather have kept quiet. Even Sherlock Holmes served England in the war. In the story that Conan Doyle intended to be the last Holmes outing, His Last Bow, published in 1916, Holmes outwits a German spy.
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The Sherlock Holmes stories also owe a debt to Edgar Allan Poe, who is often credited with having created the modern detective tale. The Gold Bug (1843), The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842-1843), and The Purloined Letter (1844) are all, in a sense, precursors to Conan Doyle's detective stories.
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The lost world
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To be released in 2015 MOVIE: "Mr. Holmes" A 93-year-old Holmes (Ian McKellan) revisits one unsolved mystery, based on the 2005 novel "A Slight Trick of the Mind" by Mitch Cullin.
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Using interviews and archival materials, How Sherlock Changed the World, explores real crimes that were solved thanks to techniques, equipment or methods of reasoning Holmes used.
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Watson's never-ending adulation, which is presumably meant to mirror our own understanding of the legendary detective,
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What can I say. The best there is in detective fiction
Bio
When Doyle graduated from Stonyhurst College in 1876, his parents expected that he would follow in his family's footsteps and study art, so they were surprised when he decided to pursue a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh instead. At med school, Doyle met his mentor, Professor Dr. Joseph Bell, whose keen powers of observation would later inspire Doyle to create his famed fictional detective character, Sherlock Holmes.
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n 1885, while still struggling to make it as a writer, Doyle met and married his first wife, Louisa Hawkins. The couple moved to Upper Wimpole Street and had two children, a daughter and a son. In 1893, Louisa was diagnosed with tuberculosis. While Louisa was ailing, Doyle developed an affection for a young woman named Jean Leckie. Louisa ultimately died of tuberculosis in Doyle's arms, in 1906. The following year, Doyle would remarry to Jean Leckie, with whom he would have two sons and a daughter.
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the first crime scene investigator, is not solely as a reservoir of brilliant stories and wonderfully drawn characters, but can be found in the development of modern scientific criminal investigation techniques and improved methods for capturing today's criminals.
