Author: Sherry Helms

Social Networking Sites have always been of great help to us at times when we get stuck in the perplexity of who is better. Once again our reader-base on SNS helped us concluding which fictional detective is preferable to solve a crime: Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie’s creation). Majority of our SNS connections voted for Sherlock Holmes, a creation by the Scottish author and physician Arthur Conan Doyle.

So, in this post we try to encapsulate the characteristics, appearances and other valuable information related to Sherlock Holmes, the most admired and highly-read Detective in the world of Fiction. Though not a comprehensive work, this post may offer all the handy facts about this great sleuth.

Considered as an archetype for other creations of fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes mesmerizes the readers with his dexterity of digging up the mysteries by logical reasoning. He is famous for his ability to adopt almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve difficult cases. Holmes works on the base of Science of Deduction, a principle asserts that any problem can be solved if the necessary information is given.

Besides, appearing in 56 short stories, this unrivaled detective becomes visible in four novels, of which “A Study in Scarlet (1887)“ was the first, and “The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)“ remains the most popular. The other two are “The Sign of the Four“ and “The Valley of Fear“. The character grew tremendously in popularity with the first series of short stories in Strand Magazine, beginning with “A Scandal in Bohemia” in 1891, followed by well-received “The Red-Headed League” and “His Last Bow”. All the short stories portraying sleuthing skills of Holmes, which originally published in periodicals, were later gathered into five anthologies: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes;  The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes; The Return of Sherlock Holmes; The Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes; and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

The Guinness World Records has listed Sherlock Holmes time and again as the “most portrayed movie character” with 75 actors playing the part in over 211 films. Holmes’s first screen appearance was in the Mutoscope film Sherlock Holmes Baffled in 1900, although in a barely-recognizable form. Of the many actors who have played Sherlock Holmes, some popular names are Basil Rathbone, Ronald Howard and Jeremy Brett who are considered by the critics to be the ultimate Holmes.

If you are a fan of Sherlock Holmes and want to go through all his acumen, click here.

Tags: Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2012 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.