the strange case of sherlock holmes and arthur conan doyle

These have ranged from the works of Nicholas Meyer – The Seven Per Cent Solution (1973), filmed as The Seven Per Cent Solution (1976), The West End Horror (1976) and The Canary Trainer (1993), which has Holmes meeting contemporaries like Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and The Phantom of the Opera or films like A Study in Terror (1965) and Murder By Decree (1979), which have Holmes solving the Jack the Ripper murders. There has grown a body of books and films that treat Sherlock Holmes in an exegetic manner – deconstructing him, analysing aspects of the stories that were never explained or only hinted at, writing further adventures or speculating about Holmes meeting other characters from Victorian fiction or history. Sherlock Holmes is such an iconic creation that even more than a century later, there would probably be hardly a person on the planet who would not know who Sherlock Holmes is.

For literary audiences of the late 1890s and early 20th century, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were probably the equivalent of a series of blockbuster movies today.

With Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle managed to depict the detective who pursued the truth through a process of intuitive ratiocination in a way that became an absolute archetype of the genre. Writer Arthur Conan Doyle cannot be said to be the first to create the literary detective, but was certainly the foremost populist. Sherlock Holmes is one of the genuine iconic characters of literary fiction. However, Selden is not who he seems to be. There Selden begins to dig up secrets from Doyle’s past that were instrumental in the creation of Sherlock Holmes.

Selden begins digging into Doyle’s past, including talking to Dr Joseph Bell, Doyle’s mentor who served as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. At the same time, Doyle’s publisher assigns the biographer Selden to write the story of Doyle’s life. He also writes a story in which he kills Sherlock Holmes off, much to the upset of his legions of fans, so that he can devote his time to more serious writings. In trying to deal with his grief, Doyle turns to spiritualism in the hope of contacting his father and saying what he never had the opportunity to in life. Doyle rushes to see his father who is incarcerated in a hospital for the insane and is severely withdrawn, but is unable to communicate with him before he dies. In the midst of celebrations for Christmas of 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle, world famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, receives a mysterious drawing with the words ‘Help Me’ written on it.

The strange case of sherlock holmes and arthur conan doyle