Short Story Collections (Single Author), Other Mystery Categories

Sherlock Holmes

Name: Sherlock Holmes
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
ISBN: 9781412183604

by Arthur Conan Doyle

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Overview

The Sherlock Holmes Experience: A Vook Double Feature includes two of Conan Doyle's short stories from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The Man with the Twisted Lip and The Adventure of the Speckled Band are brought to life with videos that tell of the people and places behind the stories. They provide a glimpse into the world of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes and what inspired the innovative crime fighting series written by Conan Doyle.

The Sherlock Holmes short stories were originally published as single stories in the Strand Magazine in 1891-1892. Twelve of the stories were later published in a book, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The character of Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887 in, A Study in Scarlet.

About the Author, Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was both a doctor and a believer in spirits, which may partly explain why his Sherlock Holmes is one of literature's most beloved detectives: Holmes always approaches his cases with the gentility and logic of a scientist, but the stories are suffused with an aura of the supernatural. Narrated by devoted assistant Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes's adventures were so addictive that fans protested the master deducer's "death" in 1893 and Doyle had to resurrect him.

Biography

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859. After nine years in Jesuit schools, he went to Edinburgh University, receiving a degree in medicine in 1881. He then became an eye specialist in Southsea, with a distressing lack of success. Hoping to augment his income, he wrote his first story, A Study in Scarlet. His detective, Sherlock Holmes, was modeled in part after Dr. Joseph Bell of the Edinburgh Infirmary, a man with spectacular powers of observation, analysis, and inference. Conan Doyle may have been influenced also by his admiration for the neat plots of Gaboriau and for Poe's detective, M. Dupin. After several rejections, the story was sold to a British publisher for £25, and thus was born the world's best-known and most-loved fictional detective. Fifty-nine more Sherlock Holmes adventures followed.

Once, wearying of Holmes, his creator killed him off, but was forced by popular demand to resurrect him. Sir Arthur -- he had been knighted for this defense of the British cause in his The Great Boer War -- became an ardent Spiritualist after the death of his son Kingsley, who had been wounded at the Somme in World War I. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in Sussex in 1930.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Group (USA).