Literary Trivia

Arthur Conan Doyle

Knight

Patriot, Physician and Man of Letters

 did the absolute unthinkable.

He murdered Sherlock Holmes.

In 1893 when Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson were still gracing the pages of *The Strand Magazine and already had quite the following, Conan Doyle, for whatever reason, decided he’d had it with Sherlock Holmes - In December, when Londoners opened their magazines expecting to settle-in quite nicely with The Adventure of the Final Problem, they were aghast to discover that Conan Doyle had killed off their hero. Falling into the abyss of mourning, Londoners strapped-on grief armbands, and demanded that Conan Doyle the assassin, be held accountable. People were so upset that more than twenty thousand of them cancelled their subscription to The Strand Magazine.

It wasn’t until 1901 (02?), when Conan Doyle brought back a ghostly Sherlock in The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized in The Strand, that Conan Doyle knew he would never be free of Sherlock Holmes. The public's response to seeing the return of their hero, even as a ghost, was phenomenal. The magazine's circulation rose by thirty thousand overnight.

Later, in The Adventure of the Empty House, Watson learns that Holmes' death was a ruse to hide from Moriarty's associates, and thus, Sherlock Holmes is back in business, and Conan Doyle? Well, let‘s just say the rest, my dear Watson, is history.

This Original Drawing, by Sidney Pagnet, of Holmes and Moriarty at the Edge of the Reichenbach Falls (The Adventure of the Final Problem) sold by Sotheby's in New York in 2004 for $220,800.

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
*Published by George Newnes

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