Original subtitles

Mr. Holmes?

Hello. Over 260 films to date, 1,000 television episodes, and just as

many imitations.

Not to mention the video games, comic books, adapted more frequently than

Dracula, Frankenstein, Napoleon, or Jesus Christ.

Across the ages and continents, here's the literary myth, Par excellence.

My name is Holmes, Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people

don't know.

A unique appearance.

A legendary street address.

The name Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221 D Baker Street.

A motto that we all know.

It's elementary.

A brilliant sense of deduction.

I smell the faint sweet odor of blackmail.

Sherlock Holmes, a paper creation.

born out of a writer's brilliant imagination.

Arthur Conan Doyle, a character as extraordinary as his famous detective,

measuring 1.92m for 100kg of muscle, an accomplished sportsman, cricket

champion, prize fighter, a matchless snooker player, inventor, among other

things, of competitive downhill skiing, the life jacket and the inflatable raft,

an adventurer at heart, a chivalrous spirit ready for anything, and a genius

writer. Any way you look at it, Conan Doyle was larger than life.

And if Sherlock Holmes finally erased his creator from our collective memory,

it was only after a terrible fight to the death.

The war between Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes lasted for over 40 years.

It began in 1886 in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England.

Arthur Conan Doyle was 27 years old and had already lived through many

adventures, first as a ship surgeon on a whaler in the Arctic, then along the

coasts of Africa.

Barely settled in his cottage in Portsmouth, he passed the time indulging

in his passion, writing.

He was an intellectual man.

There was art in the family and Arthur had inherited it. His father was a

painter. His uncle, Richard, was a very accomplished and well-known painter and

cartoonist. But Arthur had literary ambitions.

He had always had an urge to be a writer.

The descendant of Irish aristocracy of French origin from Ouissur-en, he was

raised by his mother in adoration of the Middle Ages, dreaming of writing

historical novels.

But as a newlywed, he needed money.

Why not try his hand at these crime and mystery short stories that people liked

so much?

Though he couldn't know it at the time, his first masterstroke was to invent a

brand new type of detective.

He trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes topping, occasionally

kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face.

In one place he gathered up very carefully a little pile of grey dust

from the floor and packed it away in an envelope.

Observe carefully.

deduce astutely, and confirm with proof.

Conan Doyle certainly took his models from literature, be it Edgar Allan Poe

or the French writer Gaboriau, but he dared to go beyond all conventions by

building intrigues around his character's extraordinary sense of

observation and use of scientific methods.

What do you think? There's been murder there.

The murderer was a man.

He was in the prime of life.

Six feet in height, has small feet, wears square-toed boots, limps slightly

on the left foot and smokes Trichinopoly cigars.

A science of deduction inspired by Dr Joseph Bell, Conan Doyle's professor at

medical school, and whose own powers of deduction wowed his students and was

often called upon by Scotland Yard.

He would look at the patient, he would hardly allow the patient to open his

mouth, But he would make his diagnosis of the disease and also very often of

the patient's nationality and occupation and other points entirely by his power

of observation.

So naturally, I thought to myself, well, if a scientific man like Bell was to

come into the detective business, he wouldn't do these things by chance.

He'd get the thing by building it up scientifically.

Furthermore, there's something in that bag she wants to show me.

What makes you say that? The bag doesn't match her dress, indicating he was

picked for size rather than style.

It accommodates on bulky objects.

You read the stories, you see how clever he is, you think, oh, yes, now he's

explained it, I see how he did it. I could do that.

You couldn't.

But it's nice to think that you could.

And the second stroke of genius was his narrator, John Watson, a military doctor

who has returned wounded from Afghanistan.

Sherlock Holmes' roommate, his companion, and the witness to his

adventures.

He is the ideal intermediary between the reader and Holmes.

Hello? Yes, Lestrade?

The detective was originally to have been called Sherinford Holmes.

His companion, rather hilariously, was Ormond Sacker.

Thank goodness he had second thoughts about those names as well, and they

became Sherlock Holmes and Dr John H. Watson.

He called the story at first a tangled skein.

It became A Study in Scarlet.

The basis of Sherlock Holmes' success was in place from the very first volume.

Yet turned down everywhere, A Study in Scarlet would finally come out in the

modest Beaton's annual, and even then it was with conditions.

They offered him £25 for the complete copyright.

if he would agree to its being held over till the following year.

Because, as they said, the market is flooded at present with cheap fiction.

Not exactly encouraging, is it?

But he accepted the offer, and A Study in Scarlet became the leading story

in Beaton's Christmas Annual for 1887.

Sherlock Holmes' first investigation was a commercial failure.

Was Conan Doyle embarrassed?

Relieved instead that the Sherlock Holmes distraction was over and he was

free to return to working on real literature.

Or so he thought.

An American editor read A Study in Scarlet and liked it.

Passing through London, he invited Conan Doyle to dinner, along with the famous

dandy Oscar Wilde.

He commissioned a story from each of them to help launch his own magazine,

Lippincotts, in England.

Oscar Wilde wrote his masterpiece, The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

Conan Doyle hesitated.

Should he stop writing his real novel?

Never. But he needed money so terribly. Having settled in London and with still

no patience and a newborn baby, a hundred pounds...

represented a small fortune.

He reluctantly returned to Sherlock Holmes and after a short month delivered

the novel The Sign of Four, published in February 1890.

There was no big fuss and it seemed like the end of something that had never

really begun.

It was then that an event would change the course of his life.

The following year, the Strand magazine appeared.

Within a short while,

It was doing as well as any of the several monthly magazines at the time.

So he wrote another story with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as the leading

characters.

Still in need of money, Conan Doyle offered a short story.

A Scandal in Bohemia was published in July 1891.

It was an immediate hit.

The Strand clamored for more stories urgently.

£150 for six stories to be published each month, like episodes of a serial.

It had not been done before.

A series of connected short stories, all complete in themselves, but

with the same characters.

That was something new.

I take the new issue of the Strand magazine is out, containing another of

your slightly lurid tales.

Indeed? What do you call this one?

I call it A Scandal in Bohemia. Not a bad title, eh?

Doyle invented the modern detective story.

All modern detective stories begin with Sherlock Holmes. Just the very idea of

the three-act book, starting with a murder, the investigation of a solution,

self-contained in that way. Nobody had done it before Doyle.

The public was crazed, begging even for past issues.

After a difficult beginning, Sherlock Holmes had suddenly conquered the

readers, and he seemed to have won the first round against Conan Doyle's

literary ambitions.

He was a man who...

who was believable even if he was unusual, and he lived in the world, in

the city that people knew.

You might go out into Baker Street and see a tall, thin man, and you could

believe that this was the real Sherlock Holmes.

A third equally fascinating, tremendous and shadowy character was London itself,

swallowed in fog, with terrible crimes taking place under cover of night.

The city of Jack the Ripper and of terrifying underworlds.

And one man faced this thriving empire of evil alone, engaged in a struggle to

the death.

All of the stories are magnetized by this opposition between the city outside

and Holmes, the asocial genius withdrawn inside his apartment.

Very curious.

What I love about the books is the way evil...

spreads its tentacles.

So in the Sign of Four, it's a temple in Agra in India.

In the Valley of Fear, it's the Valley of Vermissa in America. Or a study in

Scarlet, it's the Plains of Utah.

Places far, far away that nobody in London knows, yet which somehow invade

London with their evil. It is not necessarily London. The books may happen

there, but the evil comes from everywhere.

Holmes himself says in one of the stories, the lowest and vilest alleyway

in London does not present a more dreadful record of crime than the

smiling and beautiful countryside.

I'm a consulting detective, the only one in the world that invented the job. What

does that mean?

means when the police are out of their depth, which is always, they consult me.

The police don't consult amateurs.

Why was it so successful?

Because Sherlock Holmes gave a face to something that had not been articulated

before, as if he embodied the spirit of the times.

Foremost, the desire to believe in science's omnipotence amid an era that

had been completely overthrown by the fascinating, and worrying industrial

revolution his astounding deductive virtuosity bore with it a

promise of the eventual triumph of reason the end of darkness

when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains however

improbable must be the truth

Sherlock Holmes represents hope in the middle of darkness.

I think that what you get with Conan Doyle's invention of Sherlock Holmes is

the possibility that reason can shine through and answer all the puzzles of

the world.

An unflinching rationalist, Arthur Conan Doyle brilliantly ushered in a new

discipline, forensics.

Not an accident, my dear fellow.

I'm afraid it's murder.

The first police laboratory was established in Lyon in 1910 by the

Frenchman Edmond Locard, who cited Sherlock Holmes' adventures as his main

source of inspiration.

They'd been just one step from fiction to reality.

Taking fingerprints, analyzing dust and fabrics, examining all sorts of traces.

These methods, described by Conan Doyle, applied by Sherlock Holmes.

developed by Locard, form the foundation of modern investigative work.

But it's not possible to reduce our fascination with Conan Doyle's

characters simply to his scientific prowess.

Otherwise, why would we be so enraptured with him more than a century after his

birth?

If there's one reason I might put forward, and it's no more than my own

analysis and a paradoxical explanation,

it's that he created a truly unsympathetic and various social

character, not the kind of hero that we are used to finding in the role of the

hero.

I say, Holmes?

What?

It's morning.

Allow me to congratulate you on a brilliant bit of deduction.

From the start, his character is insufferable. His knowledge is both, you

know, vast and very limited.

Nothing else is of any interest to him. And his character is dark from the very

beginning because he's a misunderstood, unstable, unhappy genius.

He's an excessive character, one who goes too far.

Got anything?

Not much. She's German.

Rache!

He may be excessively aware of his own intelligence and talent, but he also

suffers from it.

He suffers from being a bit out of touch with the world around him.

It's something that pushes him a bit further into his way of devoting

himself, a bit like someone in the orders, though instead of being devoted

to a religion, it's his detective work, which is a sort of calling.

Sherlock Holmes is not a very pleasant man. He has no interest in music, in

art. Well, he plays the Stradivarius, but he doesn't listen to music in any

way. He doesn't have any interest in great food or politics. He has no

conversation. He has terrible moods. He takes cocaine.

a drug addict.

What is it tonight?

Morphine or cocaine?

Well, I can strongly recommend a 7% solution of cocaine.

Would you care to try it?

I don't know how Arthur Conan Doyle did it, but when we readapt Sherlock Holmes'

codes today, it always works.

There's a series called Dr. House, clearly inspired from Sherlock Holmes.

The character is unsympathetic, is a drug user like him, and also lives at

number 221B. There's a sort of alchemy to this character that is at once

detestable and remarkable.

Thank you.

It was Conan Doyle's genius to only describe Holmes through Watson's eyes,

the embodiment of the everyman.

Watson has a very precious role in Sherlock Holmes' existence.

He brings Holmes back to reality and bounds him to Earth. How can you risk

such damage?

To the great powers with which you have been endowed.

He's the most normal character in Sherlock Holmes' universe, and thus the

easiest to identify with.

And at the same time, Watson is like us. He's fascinated by Sherlock Holmes.

That was amazing.

He's also Sherlock's only friend, if I might be called a friend, which wasn't

the case at first.

You got all that because you realized the case would be pink. It had to be

pink, obviously.

Why didn't I think of that? Because you're an idiot.

Our link to Holmes.

We see him through Watson's eyes, and Watson, although he's not blind to

Holmes' faults, Watson likes Holmes.

Because of Watson, we like Holmes too, and we like them above all together.

The genius of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was to create not two great characters, but

one, the greatest friendship in literature.

That, I think, is part of the secret of the success of the books.

There is something crucial to Sherlock Holmes' success.

Readers grabbed onto him and shaped him in their own fashion, far differently

from the way Conan Doyle had imagined.

I saw him as very tall, over six feet, but so excessively lean that he seemed

considerably taller.

A thin, razor-like face with a great hawk's bill of a nose and two small eyes

set close together on either side of it.

Lestrange's illustrator Sidney Padgett played a key role in the affair,

endowing him with the traits of his own brother, used as a model.

Sherlock Holmes came to life under his pencil.

Padgett's fixed in the public mind the image of Sherlock Holmes.

It wasn't just the man himself, it was his clothing as well.

And because Sidney himself wore a deerstalker when he was out, he gave the

deerstalker to Sherlock.

That's one of the things that the public latched on to. They loved this.

The deerstalker, the coat.

then the pipe and the magnifying glass.

Thus the myth evolved, progressively escaping from its author, forced,

despite himself, to bow to his reader's vision.

When later on, William Gillette, the actor, became the first to

play Sherlock Holmes in an authorised play, he replaced the

straight pipe.

which appears in Sidney Padgett's illustrations with a curved pipe,

because he could hold it without obscuring his mouth.

Each effectively brought their little piece to the whole, then something

strong started to build up in the collective unconscious.

If you ask anyone to quote a phrase by Sherlock Holmes, everyone will answer,

Elementary, my dear Watson.

It features in none of Arthur Conan Doyle's books. None.

Yet, who would hark today that Elementary, my dear Watson, is not his?

It's his.

Now, what are you saying, Godson?

Uh... Well?

Uh... What?

Uh... The mystery at the museum!

Elementary, my dear Godson.

Elementary.

Thanks to the fortunes coming from the Strand, Conan Doyle could live off his

craft from as early as 1892.

But he had other worries.

His paper creation had taken life and was starting to steal from his work.

Creating a character is just like raising a child.

We give them the elements that seem essential for them to grow.

We gave them the values that seem essential in order for them to live the

life we wish for them.

And then at a certain moment, they emancipate themselves.

They make their own decisions.

And that's what Sherlock did.

He became stronger. He became more powerful.

He escaped from his creator. And that was very hard for Arthur Conan Doyle to

take. Conan Doyle became fed up with Sherlock Holmes, his greatest creation.

Why? Because he thought he was a better writer.

He was also fascinated by things like spiritualism, by politics, by travel, by

the world. And he thought of Sherlock Holmes as sort of a, beneath him, an

entertainment. He had it in him, he knew, to be a novelist. One of his

greater idols was Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish novelist who

wrote Ivanhoe, Rob Roy.

He was the man, really, who created the historical novel.

And Arthur was a great admirer of the ideals of medieval

knightly chivalry. And this is what he wanted to write about.

And he did.

Alongside the Sherlock Holmes stories, he had written two historical epics.

Micah Clarke had a tepid reception, but his medieval adventure, The White

Company, had been widely acclaimed.

Conan Doyle believed himself to descend from the Breton king Conan I.

Yet, it was still Sherlock Holmes that readers called out for. It was a

difficult blow for the writer.

He had the impression that Sherlock Holmes' investigations did not help him.

Conan Doyle, to progress as a writer.

And so as the Strand magazine clamored for a new Sherlock Holmes story every

month, Conan Doyle struggled to make sure their quality did not drop.

He cared that his story's literary value remained the same. That's why he finally

felt like a prisoner, and then could no longer even stand Sherlock Holmes at

all.

He decided to kill Sherlock Holmes.

And when he told his mother about this decision, She was furious.

She wrote to him, you can't, you won't, you mustn't.

The Strand magazine also came charging back, ordering another series from him.

Conan Doyle hesitated, then demanded more money.

Considerably more money than they paid him for the first set.

Hoping that they'd say no.

They didn't. They said, yes, please.

Trapped. £1,000 for 12 new adventures.

Three times more than for the first series.

Who could resist?

And so in 1892, Conan Doyle returned to Sherlock Holmes.

A gilded cage, but a cage nonetheless.

And this damn detective was starting to overshadow him.

People did seem to believe that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, even in those

early days.

Arthur Conan Doyle was getting letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes, and he was

not particularly happy about it.

Come in.

Oh, Dr. Watson, this came by hand for Mr. Holmes not ten minutes ago.

Thank you, Mrs. Hudson.

Dear Sherlock Holmes, I would be pleased if you could help the German police to

solve a most mysterious robbery.

Dear Mr.

Holmes, our office requires your services on account of one of our

clients. Please kindly notify us of your availability.

I have your friend, Dr. Watson.

If you wish to see him alive again, immediately send £5,000 to this address.

Not so very long ago, there was a poll taken by one of the major newspapers

historical people and asking whether they knew which were real and which were

fictional. An awful lot of them thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional

character, but Sherlock Holmes was a real person.

We all know that he doesn't exist, and we all know that 221B Baker Street

doesn't exist.

We all know that it's made up, but we like to believe it. This character is so

well made psychologically that he could exist.

Detective story provides a sort of a comfort, I think, a reassurance that it

is possible in one way at least, even if it is only a whodunit, to find the

absolute truth.

And therefore, I think people do become very invested in this character and want

to believe in him as more than just a sort of figment of somebody's

imagination. Like a child writing to Santa Claus, we need something to

believe in. And there is no harm, I think, in believing in Sherlock Holmes.

Some characters, psychically very strong ones, escape from the creations and

arrive in our world.

And if we admit that things circulate between the real world and the world of

fiction, then we may also ask ourselves whether we ourselves are not fictional

characters. This uncertainty is what Freud calls the uncanny, played on by

literature and mythical characters to the point that we can no longer be sure

if they exist or not.

Fiction was becoming more powerful than reality, invading and transforming it.

Not only was that devilish Sherlock Holmes ruining his career as a writer,

but there he was attempting to erase him, his creator, reducing him to the

role of simple secretary.

If Holmes wanted a fight, he was going to get it.

The great Conan Doyle was not one to do things halfway.

This final story would be an apotheosis.

He created a master criminal, gave him the name of a

fellow pupil at Stonyhurst School, Moriarty, and made him Holmes's

intellectual equal, a man as brilliant as Sherlock Holmes himself.

Professor Moriarty. A titanic confrontation with a worthy adversary,

the nefarious Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, the evil genius and

Prince of Darkness, his inversed double.

And their final battle would take place in a spectacular setting, the

Reichenbach Falls, which he discovered while touring Switzerland.

The final problem was published in The Strand in December of 1893.

The story ended with the inevitable conclusion, Holmes and Moriarty falling

intertwined, the two sides of the same mystery, light and darkness united,

dying together in the Reichenbach's frothing abyss.

Conan Doyle had sacrificed the goose that laid the golden eggs, and without

regret. And the readers were horrified.

They didn't want to believe it.

It's said that people went about their business in the city wearing mourning

bands on their sleeves.

Letters of protest were written to the author and to the publisher.

And in his memoirs, Conan Doyle quotes one, which starts,

You brute!

I heard of many who wept.

I fear I was utterly callous myself, and only glad to have the chance of opening

out into new fields of imagination, for the temptation of high prices made it

difficult to get one's thoughts away from homes.

Free at last, despite the pleas and menaces he held strong.

No more homes.

The mere mention made him feel nauseous.

But most of all, he felt alive once again, traveling the world despite the

tuberculosis of his wife, Louisa.

He had Norwegian skis delivered to Davos, Switzerland, launching the sport.

In America, his conference tour met with huge crowds.

He spent many months in Egypt for the sake of Louisa's health.

As soon as he returned, he settled the family into a huge house in Surrey and

began work on a new series of historical novels.

In 1897, at 38 years of age, he fell madly in love with a 24-year-old beauty.

The liaison would remain platonic for several years.

Then, when trouble broke out in Sudan in 1898, heeding the call of adventure, he

left as a war correspondent.

Another war erupted in South Africa between the British and the Boers, and

despite his age, he enlisted in 1899 and established a field hospital at his own

expense.

He wrote many articles defending the British situation.

And for this he was knighted in 1902, thenceforth to be known as Sir Arthur

Kernan Doyle.

Sherlock Holmes defeated?

Not so simple. The rascal held fast.

Almost ten years after having disappeared, he returned.

My mind rebels at stagnation.

Give me problems.

Give me work.

Give me the most abstruse cryptogram, the most intricate analysis, and I'm in

my proper atmosphere.

The public called out for Holmes.

Conan Doyle needed money, and he finally gave in.

But just once, and it would be a rather odd return.

Under pressure from his readers, Doyle was forced to bring him back, and

actually used a ploy, because he didn't present the investigation as happening

after Holmes' death, but as an old case.

This old case was the Hound of the Baskervilles, which he set three years

before Holmes' death.

It was out of the question for him to resuscitate his hero.

Surprise! He was no longer battling the darknesses of London, but a fantastical

creature, a big black dog who, under cloak of night, was spreading fear

across the moors.

It's a fairly strange book. The mood is off.

And then there's the strange absence of homes.

who appears very little since it's Watson who is central to the discussions

and investigations.

Which is a problem since in this book, as in the investigations on the whole,

Watson is presented as a complete fool.

He is the perfect example of the person who sees nothing, understands nothing

and is wrong in his interpretations.

Sherlock Holmes is there, but in the distance, conducting his own

investigation and watching Watson.

as if Conan Doyle returning to his hero had been seized by doubt.

Conan Doyle's ambivalence towards Sherlock Holmes in this story is such

that one's allowed to wonder if the whole investigation is not overcome with

weariness.

Because, as others have noted, the case does not really hold together.

What's remarkable is just how many times Sherlock Holmes makes mistakes.

We go from one implausibility to the next, from incoherence to incoherence.

We have no figure of absolute truth whatsoever.

On the contrary, there's someone with gaps in their reasoning, and these are

the gaps that we must fall through to see the Hound of the Baskervilles in a

completely different light.

Sherlock Holmes caught out?

If we take the clues at face value, it is clear that the detective has the

wrong culprit.

But furthermore, he seems quite ambiguous this time.

He often appears over the moors as a dark, maleficent figure that even Watson

doesn't recognize.

It's been a lovely day, Watson.

Far too lovely to spoil.

I hope you'll be careful with that revolver. And so he's presented doubly,

duplicitous and ambiguous.

He's the representative for the good and truth, but in the same book, he's also

the representative of far more obscure, dark forces and of error.

Quickly, what's that?

Conan Doyle very clearly understood the character's double power.

This is why Sherlock Holmes became a myth.

The Hound of the Baskervilles would go on to be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most

famous story.

Its success remained unequalled.

There was an uproar after its publication in the Strand in 1901 and a

tremendous amount of pressure to bring back Holmes.

But this time there was nothing doing. It really was over, claimed the author.

Even for $5,000 per story, plus royalties, offered by the American

magazine Colliers?

$30,000 for six stories.

$65,000 for 13.

Impossible to refuse.

And so Sherlock Holmes was resuscitated on September 23,

1903.

Legends aren't killed so easily.

I think it is interesting, the whole idea of the writer who finds himself

hidden by his own creation, who finds himself smaller than his creation. The

same thing in a way happened to Ian Fleming, who got rid of James Bond not

once, but twice. From Russia with Love, he's poisoned and is meant to die, and

at the end of You Only Live Twice, he's got amnesia, he's vanished as a Japanese

fisherman.

But all the time these characters come back, they won't go away.

Watson, do you mind if I smoke a cigarette in your consulting room?

But how did Sherlock Holmes survive his fall?

Elementary, my dear Watson. He never fell.

A Japanese wrestling move had sent Moriarty ad patres.

So to explain his hero's extended absence, Conan Doyle invented a myriad

of adventures.

During this period known as the Great Hiatus, Holmes had changed identities.

He'd met the Dalai Lama in Tibet, explored Norway, crossed Persia, visited

Mecca, lived in Khartoum.

Sherlock Holmes won in the end.

Seemingly appeased, Conan Doyle had surrendered.

Throughout the following 33 adventures, Conan Doyle played with his character,

had fun creating a biography for him, perhaps as a way of reaffirming his

authority over Holmes.

Born in 1854, Sherlock Holmes came from the aristocracy and had an elder

brother, Mycroft, who worked for the government.

Dr. Watson would marry while the detective remained a hardened bachelor,

faithful to the memory of the mysterious Irene Adler, the adventuress he'd met

back in a scandal in Bohemia.

If you must record my exploits, I do wish you'd put less emphasis on the

melodramatic and more on the intellectual issues involved.

It's true that Arthur Conan Doyle's life changed.

His wife Louisa died in September 1906.

A year later, he then married his great love, Jean Leckie, with whom the

relationship had previously remained platonic.

He travelled with her and the children from both marriages, trying his hands at

politics, fascinated by the march of progress.

all in all a peaceful coexistence with his burdensome detective and he decided

to show that he was at least on a par in real life wasn't he the creator and so

doyle began playing at detective conan doyle himself

was generally more like Watson than like Holmes. But because he was able to

create and solve these fictional crimes and mysteries, he knew that he could

adapt his mind temporarily to become a detective.

And he was a man with a great sense of justice.

So when people came to him with problems, if he thought the problems

were serious enough,

In 1906, he took up the cause of a young lawyer condemned to seven years'

imprisonment for the mutilation of animals.

The evidence proved George Ilalji innocent, but his Indian descent had

made him the perfect scapegoat.

Conan Doyle succeeded in methodically demonstrating the miscarriage of

justice.

Arthur Conan Doyle put up a really unimpeachable case

for the innocents.

Despite the fact that the man had been convicted, the conviction was never

overturned, but George Adelge was given what they call a free pardon, and

he was allowed back as a solicitor, and he was rightly grateful to Arthur Conan

Doyle for the rest of his life.

In a mischievous twist, Conan Doyle, defender of lost causes, had become a

real Sherlock Holmes.

But he was already taken with a new idea.

The discovery of a Gwanadon prince near his home had set his mind abuzz.

He was gripped by the idea of a brand new character and novel, Professor

Challenger, with his face and beard of an Assyrian bull, the antithesis of

Holmes.

A far-off country, forgotten by evolution.

A terrifying prehistorical bestiary.

The Lost World appeared in The Strand in 1912.

It was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and this time Conan Doyle's

success was in no way due to Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes, whose adventures he continued in a somewhat freewheeling fashion, pushing

him off to the countryside and the joys of beekeeping, and then bringing him out

of retirement occasionally to solve some new enigma.

The First World War found Sherlock Holmes too old to enrol, and so he was

sent to serve his country by uncovering a German spy.

The war would sweep everything aside.

Arthur Conan Doyle sensed that.

Convinced of the key role to be played by airplanes and artillery, he tried to

convince the chiefs of staff.

pestering them with advice and lobbying for bulletproof jackets and gas masks.

He enrolled and placed his writing in the service of the Foreign Office,

reporting continually from the English, Italian and French front lines.

And something broke.

At the end of the war, he seemed like a different man, marked by the horrors

he'd been through.

and the death of his eldest son, the writer ventured into unexpected

territories.

A confirmed atheist and militant rationalist, Conan Doyle became an

ardent defender of spiritualism.

Why should we fear a death which we know for certain is the doorway to

unutterable happiness?

Why should we fear our dear one's death if we can be so near to them afterwards?

Even more surprising was his fascination in 1922 for the case of two schoolgirls

in the village of Cottingley who claimed to have photographed fairies.

Though mocked, he paid no heed and considered the psychographs to be

definite proof of the existence of spirits.

They were genuine photographs, but those photographs were not of fairies. They

were of cut-out pictures from a magazine.

A very 1920s-looking little fairies.

Many people are confused as to why Conan Doyle, who believed in fairies and

ghosts and spirits, was also...

able to come up with such a rational creation as Sherlock Holmes. But I think

you have to understand Conan Doyle as a romantic.

And as a romantic, his view of science is that anything is possible.

Also at the same time...

action at a distance was being observed see effects of radiation there were

experiments with wireless telegraphy scientists therefore thought it was

possible that there could also be unseen forces which could be scientifically

proven which were also happening in spiritualism and in spiritual effects i

mean for example i mean marie curie attended seances because she was trying

to identify

What form of energy was causing tables to rise off the ground?

When I talk on this subject, I'm not talking about what I believe.

I'm not talking about what I think.

I'm talking about what I know.

There's an enormous difference, believe me, between believing a thing and

knowing a thing.

I'm talking about things that I've handled, that I've seen, that I've heard

with my own ears.

And always mind you, in the presence of witnesses.

Conan Doyle devoted the rest of his life to traveling across the world, defending

spiritualism.

The adventure of Shoscombe Old Place, the last story featuring Sherlock

Holmes, appeared in The Strand in 1927.

It was the end of 40 years of companionship and conflicts.

Exhausted, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died of a heart attack in 1930.

He was 71 years old.

A literary monument, a prolific inventor, graced with a tremendous

appetite for life, the colossus would nonetheless lose the battle with his

paper creation.

Doyle was a mere mortal, while Sherlock Holmes, who'd never lived, would not

die.

That is the paradox and ruthlessness of literature's mythical characters.

They erase the memory of their creator.

Within a few decades, Conan Doyle's other writings were forgotten, and even

more so the events of his life.

Meanwhile, in an insolent twist, his detective moved on, traveled the world

and times, ever more alive, adapted into no less than 120 novels to date.

What makes Sherlock Holmes timeless, and the reason that we like him even more a

hundred years later, is that we very quickly realized that he didn't have to

stay in Victorian London.

He could change countries, places, periods.

He was credible.

He's been set against Jack the Ripper, Dracula, Frankenstein.

Adapted into hundreds of films, parodies, he has appeared in every media

imaginable. each time he's different yet unchanged the centre of an ever-growing

passion it's as if he expresses a timeless aspect of the human spirit the

eternal opposition and enigmatic complicity of light and darkness but

isn't that precisely the power of myths