Arthur Conan Doyle: The Man Behind Sherlock Holmes and The Murder Mystery

Sherlock Holmes outlived any other character in history. Arthur Conan Doyle created him like coldly rational and smart. It's the scientific thought process of Doyle that made Sherlock Holmes the greatest fictional character in the world.

source

There are a huge amount of people who still believe Sherlock Holmes as a real person who lived in the past, That much is the appreciation the character got world wide.

Like the mysterious life Sherlock Holmes, Doyle also lived an eventful life. He had a deeply scientific mindset but contradictory to that he also believed in fairies. Doyle said,

" Never will I accept anything which cannot be proved to me."

source

He was born in Scotland in a Catholic family in 1859. It's after completing his university graduation at Edinburgh he moved to south part of England. There is a statue of Sherlock Holmes in Edinburgh City.

source

Arthur Conan Doyle started writing Sherlock stories in his free time at working as a doctor in South England.

His first Sherlock Holmes book was " A Study in Scarlet". Then eventually it became one of the famous novels and the era of Sherlock Holmes started. He wrote about 25 stories of Sherlock Holmes between 1885 and 1895. After writing a lot he had the intention of ending the novel. He didn't want to write anymore.

In the short story named "The Final Problem," Sherlock Holmes and his close friend John Watson who narrates the story travelled to Switzerland and met his enemy Prof. Moriarty.

source

There is a fight between Sherlock and Moriarty, both fight and die at Reichenbach fall. The death of Sherlock Holmes was hard to accept for the fans. The fans all over the world wrote letters to Doyle about continuing the story.

Finally, Doyle changed his mind and again started writing about Sherlock Holme's Adventures until 1920. He started with a short story "The Hound of Baskervilles in 1901, it's the story happened before Sherlock's death.

Years passed, we can see a lot of adaptations of Doyle's creation through books, radio programmes, stage shows, movies and tv shows. Most of them got very much appreciated.

There is also a 20th-century adaptation of Sherlock Holmes by BBC, the TV show named "SHERLOCK". Doyle also wrote powerful female characters like "Irene Adler" in his stories. She was one of the characters which were hard for even Holmes to crack.

source

Doyle's Sherlock stories give birth to the branch of Science of Deduction. It's about examining the possibilities to reach a logical conclusion. Sherlock worked that way to solve the murder mysteries. It's also Sherlock's style of explaining that gave him this much fans. Doyle concentrated more on the reasoning behind the findings more than the end result.

As I mentioned before, even when Doyle supported scientific reasoning he was also a believer of spiritualism. It's in the 1880's he discovered spiritualism and that affected his life. When writing Sherlock novels he also joined the British Society for Psychical Research.

In 1916 he went public about his spiritual beliefs and started giving lectures about it. That made a bad impression about him among the public. People thought he was mad. A News Paper wrote an article with a headline of "Is Conan Doyle Mad?". There was one of his other statements,

"I suppose I am Sherlock,
If anybody is, and I say that
The case for spiritualism
is absolutely proved."

After a while, he ended writing Holmes novels and started focusing entirely on spiritualism.

He wrote another book, that didn't get that much appreciation named "The Coming of the Fairies"
based on the famous incident Cottingley Fairies. In 1930 Conan Doyle died of a heart attack in the age of 71.

source

Whatever Doyle's life was all about, through his creation Sherlock Holmes he still lives. It's his mindset and thought process that gave birth to each of the modern adaptation of Sherlock Holmes.