Stephen Fry: ‘Sherlock Holmes altered the course of my whole life’

Nearly a hundred years after Arthur Conan Doyle’s last Sherlock Holmes story, the writer and broadcaster unravels the mystery of the detective’s enduring appeal It has become quite the fashion for contemporary writers to have a go at reinventing past classics. We’ve seen it done

Nearly a hundred years after Arthur Conan Doyle’s last Sherlock Holmes story, the writer and broadcaster unravels the mystery of the detective’s enduring appeal It has become quite the fashion for contemporary writers to have a go at reinventing past classics. We’ve seen it done with imperishable literary heroes like Bond, Jeeves, Poirot and Winnie-the-Pooh. This is a relatively new phenomenon.

But not in the case of Sherlock Holmes, where the practice is almost as old as the man himself. Sherlock Holmes was the conception of Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish doctor down on his luck who had turned his hand to fiction to make up for a worrying lack of success in attracting patients to his surgery. Conan Doyle could never have guessed that the first Sherlock Holmes story he wrote, A Study in Scarlet, published in the 1887 issue of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, would in a few years propel him and the characters he created to literary fame.

The personalities and characteristics of Holmes and Watson became as familiar to late Victorians as their own friends and families. The readership was worldwide and spread across all ages and classes. Continue reading...