Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle a British writer and physician was born on 22 May 1859. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction. Doyle was a prolific writer; other than Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels.
Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh medical School; Also during this period, he studied practical botany at the royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh.
His first work featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, A Study in Scarlet, was written in three weeks when he was 27 and was accepted for publication by Ward lock & Co on 20 November 1886, which gave Doyle £25 (today equivalent to £2,900) in exchange for all rights to the story. The piece appeared a year later in the Beeton's Christmas Annual and received good reviews in The Scotsman and The Glasgow Herald.
Holmes was partially modelled on Doyle's former university teacher Joseph Bell. In 1892, in a letter to Bell, Doyle wrote, "It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes ... round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man", and in his 1924 autobiography, he remarked, "It is no wonder that after the study of such a character [viz., Bell] I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal." Robert Louis Stevenson was able to recognise the strong similarity between Joseph Bell and Sherlock Holmes, "My compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. ... can this be my old friend Joe Bell?"
Nowadays, 22 of May is celebrated as Sherlock Holmes' Day to tribute its creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. We hereby offer you some pictures shot while visiting the Sherlock Hlomes Museum on 221B Backer Street, London, UK.
