Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes
By Rosa Lina Aragon & Laia Dedeu

About Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a Scottish doctor and writer and is well known for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are considered a great innovation in crime fiction.
He was a prolific writer who wrote science fictions stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction.
His first significant work was “A Study in Scarlet”, which was published in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. In it Sherlock Holmes appeared for the first time. Doyle took his university professor Joseph Bell as his model to create his famous character.
Doyle was an unsuccesful doctor who hadn’t got any patients, so he could devote more time to write. He decided to kill Sherlock Holmes in 1891, but pressure from his fans meant that he was included in other novels.

About Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes, the fictional character created in 1887 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is a “detective adviser” from London in the late nineteenth century, famous for his intelligence and skillful use of observation and deductive reasoning to solve difficult cases. He stars in a series of 4 novels and 56 short fictional stories, collected in what is called the Canon of Sherlock Holmes.
Although Auguste Dupin, a very similar character created by Edgar Allan Poe, is considered as his predecessor, he didn't reach the enormous popularity of Holmes and its author.

In nearly every book the action begins in Baker street 221 B, a place which never really existed. When Holmes and Watson are reading or talking at home or Holmes is studying a case or playing the violin, they receive a letter, read the news or a visitor arrives to their home with a problem and asking for help from the famous detective.
Holmes goes with Watson in 58 of his stories and narrates them in first person.

Nowadays there are a lot of societies devoted to this character and a lot of films have been made about him, the last one, directed by Guy Ritchie, had its premiere on December 2009. Moreover, this type of literature is very pedagogical for children and young people, because it awakes the imagination and it helps to develop the scientist reasoning from within.