Sherlock Holmes was the first fictional sleuth to use a magnifying glass. such examples as Bell gave us every day in the wards.” 4. If he were a detective, he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer an exact science. “But could I bring an addition of my own? I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details. Dupin, had from boyhood been one of my heroes,” Doyle wrote in Collier’s Magazine in 1923. Bell also studied handwriting analysis and dialectology (the art of identifying one’s origin by their words and accent), which added to his diagnostic powers. Doyle, his student, was captivated by Bell's observational acuity and ability to diagnose illnesses with just a few clues. Joseph Bell, a surgeon and professor at Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons. Heritage Images/GettyImagesĭoyle based the character of Sherlock Holmes at least in part on Dr.
Sherlock Holmes conducts a chemical investigation. The first (short) Sherlock Holmes mystery is really no mystery at all. “Considering these various journals with their disconnected stories it had struck me that a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine … Looking around for my central character, I felt that Sherlock Holmes, who I had already handled in two little books, would easily lend himself to a succession of short stories.”ĭoyle was, of course, correct: Readers of The Strand were so invested in Holmes that when Doyle killed the character off in 1893, roughly 20,000 of them cancelled their subscriptions. “A number of monthly magazines were coming out at that time, notable among which was The Strand, under the very capable editorship of Greenhough Smith,” Doyle wrote in 1924. If that proved true, then Doyle himself would be guaranteed gainful employment. He believed that the character would be a fine fit for a magazine like The Strand because a magazine’s audience would be eager to read the continuing (but largely disconnected) adventures of a single character. Hulton Deutsch/GettyImagesįollowing the novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, Doyle sought to place Holmes in what would become his natural literary habitat: the short story.
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