SHERLOCK HOMLES

KENDRIYA VIDYALAYA NO.2

SALTLAKE

BY ABHIJIT SARKAR

CLASS-7D

SHERLOCK HOLMES DAIRY

A fictional character created by the English writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes became the prototype for the modern mastermind detective. Doyle introduced Holmes in 1887 in the short story “A Study in Scarlet” and went on to write at least 50 more stories featuring the detective, as well as The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and several other novels .Doyle modeled his detective on the methods and mannerisms of his former teacher in medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh. A slim, nervously intense, hawk-nosed man, Holmes uses purely scientific reasoning to solve crimes and can make the most startling deductions from trivial details and bits of physical evidence overlooked by others. He lives at 221B Baker Street in London. His partner and best friend, Dr. John H. Watson, is the genial but slightly obtuse narrator of the Holmesian stories. Holmes's most formidable opponent is the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty.

Arthur Conan Doyle

(1859–1930). A British physician who turned to writing, Arthur Conan Doyle thought he would be remembered for his historical novels. His fame, however, rests on his creation of the master detective of fiction, the incomparable Sherlock Holmes.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 22, 1859. He was the oldest son of Charles Doyle, a civil servant. His parents were Irish Roman Catholics, and he received his early education in a Jesuit school, Stonyhurst. Later he got a medical degree at Edinburgh University. He started practice as a family physician in Southsea, England. His income was small so he began writing stories to make ends meet. In 1891 he decided to give up medicine to concentrate on his writing.

A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887, introduced Holmes and his friend Dr. John Watson. The second Holmes story was The Sign of Four (1890). In 1891 Doyle began a series for Strand magazine called "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes."

Sherlock Holmes became known to movie and television audiences as a tall and lean, pipe-smoking, violin-playing detective. He lived at 221B Baker Street in London, where he was often visited by Watson, an associate in the many adventures. And according to Doyle, it was Watson who recorded the Holmes stories for posterity.

Doyle said he modeled Holmes after one of his teachers in

Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell could, for example, glance at a

corpse on the anatomy table and deduce that the person had

been a left-handed shoemaker. “It is all very well to say that a

man is clever,” Doyle wrote, “but the reader wants to see

examples of it—such examples as Bell gave us every day in the

wards.” The author eventually became bored with Holmes and

“killed” him. In response to readers' protests, Doyle wrote his

next story explaining how the detective had miraculously

survived the death struggle on the edge of a precipice. Stories

dealing with Holmes's exploits continued to appear almost to

the end of Doyle's life.

Doyle was knighted in 1902 for his pamphlet justifying

England's part in the Boer War, in which he served at a field

hospital. He was married twice. The death of his son Kingsley in

World War I intensified Doyle's interest in psychic phenomena;

in his later years he wrote and lectured on spiritualism. He died

in Sussex on July 7, 1930..

DETECTIVE STORY

Whodunit? The dogged quest for the perpetrator of a vile crime has become the definition of the detective story. The question of whodunit keeps challenging all kinds of detectives in novels, short stories, films, radio and television series, and stage plays.

Contemporary crime writers generally specialize in hard-boiled thrillers, with tough language and rough action, or cozies, in which the characters are more refined and the violence is less explicit. Both styles make use of red-herring, or misleading, clues and phony suspects to confuse everyone except the clever detective, who can always unravel the case.

The mystery may be solved by a

professional police detective, like

Agatha Christie's Monsieur Hercule

Poirot (introduced in 1920), who has

“little grey cells” of deduction; or by a

busybody amateur, like Christie's Miss

Jane Marple (introduced in 1942), who

depends upon intuition and gossip; or

by kooky partners, like Tommy and

Tuppence Beresford (introduced in

1922), who seemingly stumble upon the

right answers. Christie's most

audacious character innovation mocked

the conventions of the genre and

infuriated armchair detectives: in The

Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) the

narrator (an acquaintance of Poirot)

turned out to be the murderer.

The professionals in contemporary detective fiction are most likely to be private eyes (PIs, or private investigators), who

have been hired specifically to prove someone's innocence or guilt—for example, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer or his

postfeminist counterpart, Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski. The first real PI was François-Eugene Vidocq, a reformed thief who

started the first official private detective bureau in Paris in 1817. His memoirs (1828–29) inspired the American short-

story writer Edgar Allan Poe to write "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). In what Poe called a ratiocinative (purely deductive) tale, a brutal double murder baffles the French police but is solved by C. Auguste Dupin—the model for

thousands of other literary detectives who operate with cool logic and without official status. The last of Poe's three "Tales"

about Dupin was printed in 1845. Although they were later credited as the first detective stories, the word detective

never appeared in any of them.

Called the “Edgar Allan Poe of France,” Émile Gaboriau wrote the first long detective story and was far more successful than Poe with detective fiction. In 1866 he began publishing installments of The Widow Lerouge, the first of 21 serial novels. Gaboriau used the two basic detective types—Père Tabaret, an amateur, and Monsieur Lecoq, the professional.

Detective fiction was introduced into England by Wilkie Collins with The Moonstone and its memorable detective, Sergeant Cuff, in 1868—still one of the best mystery stories ever written. (Collins' other masterpiece, The Woman in White, had appeared in 1860, but it was a pure mystery, not a story of detection.) Novelist Charles Dickens had also been intrigued by this type of fiction, but he died in 1870 before finishing The Mystery of Edwin Drood—still a challenge to literary detectives.

Picture gallery

The first detective novel written in the United States was by a woman, Anna Katharine Green, whose The Leavenworth Case appeared in 1878; her hero was a New York police detective. The first best seller of literary crime was an 1886 Australian thriller: The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume. The next year marked the debut of Sherlock Holmes, the first scientific detective. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a British physician, wrote four novels and 56 short stories about the immortal Holmes Arthur). After two dozen stories, Doyle killed off his hero, but he was forced by public demand to publish a reminiscence in 1902 and then pull off an ingenious resurrection in 1905. One of the best of the Holmes imitations that followed was Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, the creation of R. Austin Freeman (also a physician), who appeared in The Red Thumb Mark in 1907. Between 1911 and 1935 G.K. Chesterton published five collections of Father Brown stories. John Dickson Carr, whose specialty was the locked-room puzzle in medieval England, modeled one of his detectives (Dr. Gideon Fell) after Chesterton.

The fallible Philip Trent of Trent's Last Case (1913) by E.C. Bentley was the antithesis of Holmes. Bentley's lighthearted treatment of murder later influenced such authors as Dorothy L. Sayers, the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, and Cyril Hare. The golden era of British detective fiction began in 1920 with Freeman Wills Crofts's The Cask. The most prolific mystery writer ever was John Creasey, creator of The Toff and author of more than 500 novels.

• In the United States Mary Roberts Rinehart specialized in mystery romances, such as The Circular Staircase (1908) and Haunted Lady (1942). Carolyn Wells, author of The Clue (1909), wrote three or four detective novels a year. Melville Davisson Post, an American lawyer who began writing crime tales for magazines in 1896, used his legal background in stories that featured Randolph Mason and, later, Uncle Abner of backwoods Virginia.

Three popular American sleuths made their debut in the 1920s. Charlie Chan was introduced by Earl Derr Biggers in The House Without a Key (1925). The bicultural Chan, who endlessly quotes Confucian sayings, was based on a real Honolulu police detective. Next was the urbane Philo Vance, developed by S.S. Van Dine (the pen name of art critic Willard Huntington Wright). The Benson Murder Case (1926) was the first of a planned even dozen novels—each (except for The Gracie Allen Murder Case) designed with a six-letter name in the title. Van Dine influenced the creation of Ellery Queen, who appeared in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929). The mystery writer Queen was both hero and author (the pen name of Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay). As Barnaby Ross, they wrote four books about Drury Lane, an actor-detective (collected as The XYZ Murders).

With new standards of

realism, Dashiell Hammett

invented the hard-boiled

school . The tough, distinctly

American style was polished

by Raymond Chandler.

Hammett's Sam Spade and

Nick and Nora Charles and

Chandler's Philip Marlowe

were portrayed in classic

films. Others w

ere Erle

Stanley Gardner's Perry

Mason, Rex Stout's Nero

Wolfe, and Ross Macdonald's

Lew Archer

The Inspector Maigret stories of police procedure, written by the

Belgian-born French writer Georges Simenon, developed an international

following Simenon, Georges. The style was taken up by Ed McBain in

America and J.J. Marric in England. In The Netherlands, Robert van Gulik

wrote the Judge Dee mysteries, set in medieval China. U.S. lawyer Scott Turow depicted the criminal justice system in such contemporary best

sellers as The Burden of Proof (1990) and Pleading Guilty (1993).

 

Charlie Chan

The fictional Chinese American detective Charlie Chan was created by U.S. novelist and playwright Earl Derr Bigger. Chan was the protagonist of six novels—The House Without a Key (1925), The Chinese Parrot (1926), Behind That Curtain (1928), The Black Camel (1929), Charlie Chan Carries On (1930), and Keeper of the Keys (1932). He appeared in a long series of Hollywood films as well. The character was based on Chang Apana, a real detective of the Honolulu police force.

Dannay and Lee founded Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1941. They also edited numerous anthologies, including 101 Years' Entertainment: Great Detective Stories, 1841–1941 (1945), and cofounded Mystery Writers of America. Lee died on April 3, 1971, near Waterbury, Conn. Dannay died on Sept. 3, 1982, in White Plains, N.Y.

ELLERY QUEEN

The cousins Manfred B. Lee (1905–71) and Frederic Dannay (1905–82) cowrote a series of more than 35 detective novels featuring a character named Ellery Queen. They took the name of their most popular detective as a pseudonym.

Lee was born Manford Lepofsky in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Jan. 11, 1905. Dannay was born Daniel Nathan in Brooklyn on Oct. 20, 1905. They first collaborated on an impulsive entry for a detective-story contest; the success of the result, The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), started Ellery Queen on his career. After the publication of two more mysteries, the cousins were able to become full-time writers. They took turns creating plots and writing stories about the sleuth Queen, whose adventures have been adapted for radio, television, and film. The pair also used the pseudonym Barnaby Ross when writing about their second detective creation, Drury Lane. They would hold debates posing as Queen and Ross, who were believed by all to be two distinct authors.

PICTURE GALLERY

THE END