In our last installment of the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which we have added to help you gain an understanding of Holmes’s creator before you join us on one of our Sherlock Holmes London walks, we explained how Conan Doyle had allowed Holmes to be revived by the actor William Gillette in a stage play.
In this installment we explain how Holmes made a return in his most famous adventure The Hound of the Baskervilles. Although the main part of the story is set around Dartmoor, it begins in London. Indeed, part of the Northumberland Hotel, where Sir Henry Baskerville is staying when he first arrives in England, is now the Sherlock Holmes pub, which is featured on the Sherlock Holmes walk we conduct around Embankment and Covent Garden.
Sherlock Holmes Returns.
In 1901 Conan Doyle brought Holmes back in The Hound of the Baskerville’s which, when published in The Strand in August of that year, became a worldwide sensation and probably remains the most famous and popular Holmes adventure to this day.
On the day its first installment was due to appear a huge crowd gathered in eager anticipation outside offices of The Strand, and bribes were even offered for advance copies.
Such was the demand for this new Sherlock Holmes story that the magazine’s circulation rose by a remarkable 30,000 copies.
Although The Hound didn’t bring Holmes back from the dead - rather it was a story from before his “fatal” tumble over the Reichenbach Falls - its reception showed that there was still a great demand for the great detective and Conan Doyle began pondering how this might be done.
In the meantime on 24th October 1902 Conan Doyle was Knighted at Buckingham Palace by EdwardV11 for services rendered to the Crown during the Boer War, in which he had served as a medical doctor. Tradition maintains that the King, himself an avid Sherlock Holmes fan, added Conan Doyle’s name to his Honours list, in the hope of encouraging him to write more Sherlock Holmes stories.
We tell the story of Conan Doyle’s knighthood when we pass Buckingham Palace on our Royal and Clubland London walks.
In 1903 the American Magazine Collier’s Weekly made Conan Doyle an offer he simply couldn’t refuse. They bid $25,000 for six new Sherlock Holmes stories, $30,000 for eight, or $45,000 for thirteen. A further offer of an additional £100 per thousand words from The Strand magazine convinced Conan Doyle that Holmes was worth resurrecting, and thus the great detective returned from the dead in The Adventure of the Empty House.
It transpired that Holmes hadn’t in fact gone over the falls but had used his knowledge of the Japanese wrestling art of baritsu, to wriggle from Moriarty’s clutches and send his enemy plunging into the chasm instead.
Having then scrambled up the sheer cliff face, in order not to leave any give-away footprints, he had allowed the world to think he was dead to avoid any reprisals from Moriarty’s henchmen. He had then spent two years traveling the world on a sabbatical that Sherlockians term “The Great Hiatus.”
Although it received a mixed reaction from the critics, Holmes’s return was greeted with a huge amount of enthusiasm by the general public, and Conan Doyle continued writing of Holmes and Watson’s adventures regularly until 1927, when Holmes appeared in his last story The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place.
Our next instalment of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s lifestory will be published tomorrow. You can, of course join us on our Sherlock Holmes London walks to uncover the London location connected with Conan Doyle and his famous creation.
