The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

BOOK: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
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In 1894 Conan Doyle published
Round the Red Lamp
, a collection of short stories with a medical theme; in 1895
The Stark Munro Letters
, an autobiographical novel; and in 1896
The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard
, set in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1900 he traveled to South Africa in the capacity of war-time physician in Cape Town; his treatise on the Boer War earned him a knighthood in 1902. That same year Conan Doyle published
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, set before the story that had finished Holmes off in 1893. In 1903 new Holmes stories started to appear in the
Strand
.
In the coming years, Conan Doyle produced more popular books on a variety of subjects, including three new collections of stories—
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
(1905),
His Last Bow
(1917), and
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes
(1927)—plus a final Holmes novel,
The Valley of Fear
(1915). Among many other non-Holmes projects were the three Challenger novels, historical fiction and nonfiction, and several books on spiritualism. He also championed the rights of the wrongly accused, in two separate cases exonerating innocent men.
With the onset of World War I, Conan Doyle served as a war correspondent on several major European battlefields. Following the war, he became a passionate advocate of spiritualism, which he embraced in part to communicate with his eldest son, Kingsley, who had died from influenza aggravated by war wounds. From 1920 until his death, the author wrote, traveled, and lectured to promote his belief in a spiritual life after the death of the body. After a long, demanding journey through Scandinavia, Arthur Conan Doyle suffered a heart attack; he died a few months later, on July 7, 1930, in Sussex.
THE WORLD OF SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AND
SHERLOCK HOLMES
1859
Arthur Conan Doyle is born on May 22 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the second child and eldest son of ten children that will be born to Charles and Mary Foley Doyle. Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection
and Charles Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
are published.
1868
Arthur attends school with the Jesuits in England; later he will re ject Catholicism.
1871
Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass
is published. The first book of George Eliot’s
Middlemarch
is published. Royal Albert Hall, one of Britain’s most important concert venues, opens in London.
1876
Conan Doyle enrolls in the University of Edinburgh Medical School. As a student, he takes various jobs to help his family, in cluding serving as a ship’s doctor on an Arctic voyage. While at Ed inburgh, he meets Dr. Joseph Bell, whose analytical capabilities amaze his patients and students; Bell later becomes a model for Sherlock Holmes.
1879
“The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,” Conan Doyle’s first story, is pub lished in
Chambers’s Journal
, an Edinburgh weekly.
1881
Conan Doyle receives his Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery qualifications, and takes a position as ship’s doctor on a steamer en route to West Africa.
1882
He returns to Great Britain and establishes his medical practice.
1885
Conan Doyle receives his M.D. degree. He marries Louise Hawkins; her poor health makes the marriage a difficult one.
1887
A Study in Scarlet
, the debut Sherlock Holmes story, is published in
Beeton’s Christmas Annual
.
1889
Conan Doyle’s short novel
The Mystery of Cloomber
, which is con cerned with the paranormal, is published, as is
Micah Clarke
, a popular novel about the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685.
1890
The second Holmes novel,
The Sign of Four
is published, in Feb ruary in
Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine
and in October as a book. The story had been commissioned at the same dinner party at which Oscar Wilde was offered a contract for
The Picture of Do rian Gray
, also published in
Lippincott’s
this year.
1891
The White Company
, a tale of fourteenth-century chivalry, is pub lished. Conan Doyle closes his medical practice to devote more time to his writing career. Stories featuring Sherlock Holmes begin to appear regularly in the
Strand Magazine
.
1892
The story collection
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
is pub lished.
1893
The year proves stressful, as the author’s father dies and his wife is diagnosed with tuberculosis. Hoping to help Louise’s condition, the family travels to Switzerland, where Conan Doyle visits Re ichenbaeh Falls, the site he chooses for the death of Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem”; he intends for this to be the last Holmes story so that he can turn to literary work he considers more important. He joins the British Society for Psychical Re search. The story collection
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
is published.
1894
Round the Red Lamp
, a collection of medical short stories, is pub lished. Conan Doyle makes a three-month speaking tour of the United States (with one stop in Toronto), traveling in the east as far south as Washington D.C., and in the Middle West as far as Chicago; it was his first personal discovery of America.
1895
The Stark Munro Letters
, a fictionalized autobiography, is pub lished.
1896
The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard
, about a hero in the Napoleonic Wars, is published.
1897
Conan Doyle meets Jean Leckie and falls in love with her; the two maintain a platonic relationship until their marriage in 1907. Brain Stoker’s
Dracula
is published.
1900
Conan Doyle travels to South Africa to serve as a hospital doctor in the Boer War; he publishes
The Great Boer War
, an account of that conflict. Oscar Wilde dies.
1901
Queen Victoria dies.
1902
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, a Holmes novel set before “The Final Problem” (1893), is published. Conan Doyle’s work in a field hospital and his treatise on the Boer War,
The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct
, earn him a knighthood.
1903
New Holmes stories begin to appear in the
Strand Magazine.
1905
The story collection
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
is published.
1906
Louise dies of tuberculosis at age forty-nine. Conan Doyle begins investigations that will exonerate George Edalji, a man who had been wrongfully accused and sent to jail.
Sir Nigel
, a companion piece to
The White Company
(1891), is published.
1907
Conan Doyle marries Jean Leckie.
Through the Magic Door
, about the importance of books in his life, is published.
1909
The Crime of the Congo
, about Belgian atrocities in the Congo, is published.
1910
Conan Doyle investigates the case of Oscar Slater, another wrong fully accused man. E. M. Forster’s
Howards End
is published.
1912
The Lost World
is published; the first of a series of science fiction novels featuring the skeptical Professor George Edward Chal lenger, it is the best known of the author’s non-Holmes stories.
1913
The second Challenger novel,
The Poison Belt
, is published.
1914
Conan Doyle visits New York City and Canada. World War I be gins. James Joyce’s
Dubliners
is published.
1915
The final Holmes novel,
The Valley of Fear
, is published.
1916
Conan Doyle announces his belief in spiritualism, which holds that the spirit has a life after the death of the body; he will become one of its best-known advocates. James Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
is published.
1917
The Holmes story collection
His Last Bow
is published.
1918
The author’s eldest son, Kingsley, dies from war wounds and in fluenza. World War I ends. Conan Doyle publishes
The New Rev elation
, his first book on spiritualism. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s
Poems
is published.
1919
Conan Doyle’s brother, Innes, dies from pneumonia. Another book on spiritualism,
The Vital Message
, is published.
1920
From this year until his death, the author acts as an advocate for spiritualism.
1921
Conan Doyle’s mother, Mary, dies. Jean experiments with auto matic writing.
1922
Conan Doyle tours America in support of spiritualism. T. S. Eliot’s
The Wasteland
and James Joyce’s
Ulysses
are published.
1924
Conan Doyle’s autobiography,
Memories and Adventures
, is pub lished.
1926
The last Challenger novel,
The Land of Mist
, is published, as is Conan Doyle’s two-volume
History of Spiritualism
.
1927
The final Holmes story collection,
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes
, is published. Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
is pub lished.
1930
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dies on July 7 at his home in Sussex from an illness resulting from a heart attack.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived an interesting life by any standard. As a young ship’s surgeon he sailed the Arctic in a whaling ship, and later he steamed down the west coast of Africa on a cargo vessel. In midlife his fame as a writer opened doors all over the world. He showed some finer points of golf to Rudyard Kipling in a Vermont field, and argued in the newspapers with his neighbor, Bernard Shaw, about the
Titanic
. He climbed the top of the Great Pyramid in Giza, and lectured the deacons in the Great Mormon Tabernacle in Utah. As a champion of spiritualism he proclaimed that a pharaoh’s curse could indeed have caused the death of Lord Carnarvon, the patron of the Tutankhamun expedition, and assured the public that Agatha Christie, who had mysteriously disappeared, would show up safe and sound because a psychic to whom he had taken one of her gloves predicted it. He was knighted by King Edward VII for writing a pamphlet justifying the British cause in the Boer War. He wrote what he thought were important historical novels in the manner of Sir Walter Scott and through them hoped to establish his legacy. Ironically enough, all these events have a chance to be remembered only because he also created what he regarded as “a lower stratum of literary achievement,” his peerless detective, Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes has become as famous as any character in literature. His name is synonymous with brilliant deduction. Call someone “Sherlock” and everyone knows what you mean. The stories have been in print continuously since the time the first one,
A Study in Scarlet
, was published in 1887. In addition Holmes has been the leading character in hundreds of plays, films, and television shows. He made his debut in films even before Conan Doyle had finished writing the stories. Long before Basil Rath-bone and Nigel Bruce created their memorable roles of Holmes and Watson in films of the late 1930s and the 1940s, the celebrated sleuth had already been played by a host of actors on stage and screen. The stories continue to be filmed today. You have probably seen one of the excellent Granada Television episodes with Jeremy Brett, which may well be the reason you are reading this book.
Sherlock Holmes has such a strong hold on the popular imagination that he is no longer moored to the books in which he first appeared. Not satisfied by the fifty-six short stories and four novellas of the Holmes canon, writers first adopted the character by completing cases Dr. Watson had mentioned only in passing. Soon they constructed new episodes for the master detective. Film directors followed suit. Though many films have been scrupulously true to the plots of the stories, some have created their own plots. Such films include
Young Sherlock Holmes
(1985), which invented a childhood for the detective. In it Holmes and Watson meet as teenagers at a boarding school where Professor Moriarty, Holmes’s great nemesis in the books, is an encouraging teacher. It also introduces a love interest for Holmes, a young girl whose death at the hands of Moriarty, who turns into a deadly foe, explains why Holmes was never the marrying kind.
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
(1976) sends Holmes to Vienna to meet Sigmund Freud, who traces Holmes’s obsession with Moriarty to a repressed memory of his mother in the arms of the professor. In perhaps the boldest reimagining of the stories, and certainly the most amusing,
Without a Clue
(1988) reveals that Watson was the real detective genius and that Holmes was his fictional creation; when the public clamored to meet Holmes, Watson hired a dim-witted actor to play the role.
So powerful is the Holmes persona that even tangential connections attract viewers. In 2000 and 2002 the Public Broadcasting System aired a joint British-American series of mysteries that featured Conan Doyle and his teacher, Dr. Joseph Bell, on whom Holmes was partly modeled, as characters solving crimes in the manner of Holmes and Watson. Called
Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes
, the episodes weave incidents from Conan Doyle’s life into fictional plots that foreshadow the great stories to come. But clearly the draw for the series is the name of the immortal detective.
BOOK: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
13.62Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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