Who is sherlock

More than ever, fans also are taking an active role in creating their own identities for Holmes through fan fiction and art, for example. The answers provided by illustrators, scriptwriters, directors, costume designers, set designers, actors, scholars, and fans provide insights into both Victorian and the modern-day Sherlock.

But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results.

In His Last Bow , set in , Holmes is described as being 60, indicating that he was born in He claims that his grandfather was the artist Horace Vernet and we know that he has a brother Mycroft, a civil servant, who is seven years older than he is.

Holmes worked as a detective for 23 years and retired in the Sussex Downs shortly before The details of his death are unknown. We owe the looks of the great detective, to Sydney Paget, who took his "strikingly handsome" brother Walter as model, when he illustrated the Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand Magazine.

His career started at that time. And over a thousand cases by FINA , Moriarty died there and Holmes chose to disappear and make people think he is dead. He returned to active practice in EMPT. Between and he handled hundreds of private cases, some of them of the most intricate and extraordinary character, in which he played a prominent part.

SOLI , 2. When he worked, he could stop eating. He told to Watson that: « The faculties become refined when you starve them. What your digestion gains in the way of blood supply is so much lost to the brain. I am a brain. Therefore, it is the brain I must consider. In the spring of the year , Holmes's iron constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own DEVI , 7.

During his retirement, he was crippled by occasional attacks of rheumatism. Holmes thought that love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to his true, cold reason which he placed above all things. He should never marry himself, lest it bias his judgment.

SIGN , He had an aversion to women GREE , 3. However, Holmes had, when he liked, a peculiarly ingratiating way with women, and that he very readily established terms of confidence with them GOLD He thought that the woman's heart and mind were insoluble puzzles to the male ILLU , He said their most trivial action could mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct could depend upon a hair-pin or a curling-tongs SECO , He has seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner TWIS , He valued a woman's instinct LION , He could use his seduction talents to woo, for example, the Milverton's housemaid Agatha which he engaged to her to collect datas on Milverton CHAS , Holmes admitted in that he never loved.

DEVI , He was an enthusiastic musician, being a very capable performer, but also a composer of no ordinary merit.

All the afternoon he sat in the stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long thin fingers in time to the music, while his gently smiling face and his languid, dreamy eyes were as unlike those of Holmes the sleuth-hound, Holmes the relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to conceive REDH , The violin was his favourite occupation STUD , His violin style was eccentric as all his other accomplishments STUD , Watson about Holmes playing violin: « I see that I have alluded above to his powers upon the violin.

These were very remarkable, but as eccentric as all his other accomplishments. That he could play pieces, and difficult pieces, I knew well, because at my request he has played me some of Mendelssohn's Lieder, and other favourites. When left to himself, however, he would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognized air.

Leaning back in his arm-chair of an evening, he would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee. Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy.

Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly they reflected the thoughts which possessed him, but whether the music aided those thoughts, or whether the playing was simply the result of a whim or fancy, was more than I could determine. I might have rebelled against these exasperating solos had it not been that he usually terminated them by playing in quick succession a whole series of my favourite airs as a slight compensation for the trial upon my patience.

About Norman Neruda, he told that her attack and her bowing were splendid. Holmes wrote a monograph upon the polyphonic motets of Lassus which was printed for private circulation and was said by some experts to be the last word upon the subject BRUC. He had an addiction to music at strange hours DYIN , 3. In period of lethargy, he would lie about with his violin hardly moving from the sofa MUSG , 8. View source View history. Log in. A common loafer BERY.

Categories : Characters all stories Characters Sherlock Holmes stories. This page was last edited on 19 June , at Contents 1 Identity 1. He was described as a sixty-years man in Family His ancestors were country squires. Sussex, while retired. STUD , He had a tall, gaunt figure made even gaunter and taller by his long grey travelling-cloak and close-fitting cloth cap.

BERY , He had a long, thin back. MAZA , 61 He had long, thin fingers. REDH , He had a long, thin nose. SIGN , His face was narrow. HOUN , His hair were black. VALL , He had a thin hawk-like nose. He had steady grey eyes. GREE , Smoking habits Holmes smoked cigars, cigarettes, and of course, pipes. He smoked occasionally an old briar-root pipe. SIGN , 63 He smoked a cherrywood in a disputatious mood. COPP , 4 He had a litter of pipes over the mantelpiece of his bedroom. DYIN , Note that, contrary to the image widespread today, Sherlock Holmes was never smoking a calabash pipe in his adventures.

MAZA , 86 He had an abnormally acute set of senses. DANC , Mr. Sherman : a bird-stuffer who called Holmes by his christian name. LION , 17 Verner : a distant relation.

Habits He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits. CREE , 8 Holmes was certainly not a difficult man to live with. STUD , However, his incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London DYIN , 3.

The instances in which Holmes uses deduction tend to be those where he has amassed a large body of evidence, produced a number of possible explanations of that evidence, and then proceeds to find one explanation that is clearly the best at explaining the evidence.

For example, in The Sign of Four , a man is found dead in his room, with a ghastly smile on his face, and with no immediately visible cause of death. From a whole body of background information as well as evidence gathered at and around the scene of the crime, Holmes is able to infer that the murderer is not one of the various people that Scotland Yard has in custody each of them being an alternative explanation , but rather another person entirely.

As Holmes says in the story, "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

It also turned up in the Dirk Gently stories by Douglas Adams where the detective uses the opposite phrase, "because we know very much about what is improbable, but very little about what is possible". In the latter example, in fact, Holmes' solution of the crime depends both on a series of applications of general principles and argument to the best explanation.

Holmes' success at his brand of deduction, therefore, is due to his mastery of both a huge body of particular knowledge of things like footprints, cigar ashes, and poisons, which he uses to make relatively simple deductive inferences, and the fine art of ordering and weighing different competing explanations of a body of evidence.

Holmes is also particularly good at gathering evidence by observation, as well locating and tracking the movements of criminals through the streets of London and its environs in order to produce more evidence - skills that have little to do with deduction per se , but everything to do with providing the premises for particular Holmesian deductions. In the stories by Conan Doyle, Holmes often remarked that his logical conclusions were "elementary", in that he considered them to be simple and obvious.

He also, on occasion, referred to his friend as "my dear Watson". However, the complete phrase, "Elementary, my dear Watson", does not appear in any of the sixty Holmes stories written by Conan Doyle.

It does appear at the very end of the film, The Return of Sherlock Holmes , the first Sherlock Holmes sound film, and may owe its familiarity to its use in Edith Meiser's scripts for The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes radio series. It should be noted too, that our modern stereotype of police procedure — someone who looks for physical clues, rather than someone who examines opportunity and motive — comes from Holmes.

Readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories have often been surprised to discover that their author, Conan Doyle, was a fervent believer in paranormal phenomena, and that the logical, skeptical character of Holmes was in opposition to his own in many ways.

The word "Sherlock" has entered the language to mean a detective or used sarcastically if someone states the obvious. It must be noted that, in Holmesian deduction, it is important to attempt to eliminate all other possibilities, or as many as possible.

This requires quite a bit of practice to reach. Watson attempts several times to perform Holmesian deductions, and even gives his explanations. However, he fails to recognise other equally probable circumstances, and is wrong on almost every count. Holmes fans refer to the period from to the time between Holmes' disappearance and presumed death in " The Adventure of the Final Problem " and his reappearance in " The Adventure of the Empty House " as "the Great Hiatus".

It is notable, though, that one later story " The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge " is described as taking place in Conan Doyle wrote the stories over the course of a decade. Wanting to devote more time to his historical novels, he killed off Holmes in "The Final Problem", which appeared in print in After resisting public pressure for eight years, the author wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles , which appeared in , implicitly setting it before Holmes' "death" some theorise that it actually took place after "The Return" but with Watson planting clues to an earlier date.

Many have speculated on his motives for bringing Holmes back to life, notably writer-director Nicholas Meyer, who wrote an essay on the subject in the s, but the actual reasons are not known, other than the obvious: publishers offered to pay generously.

For whatever reason, Conan Doyle continued to write Holmes stories for a quarter-century longer. Some writers have come up with alternate explanations for the hiatus. In Meyer's novel, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution , the hiatus was explained as a secret sabbatical that Holmes indulged in for those years after his drug rehabilitation treatment with Sigmund Freud's help, while he light-heartedly suggested that Watson write a fictitious account claiming he had died: "They'll never believe you in any case.

John Kendrick Bangs, creator of Bangsian fantasy, wrote a book in called Pursuit of the House-Boat a sequel to his A House-Boat on the Styx , in which the souls of famous dead people start up a club in Hades. In it, the house-boat which was hijacked at the end of A House-Boat on the Styx by Captain Kidd is tracked down by the members of the club with the aid of none other than Sherlock Holmes who is indeed dead.

In his memoirs, Conan Doyle quotes a reader, who judged the later stories inferior to the earlier ones, to the effect that when Holmes went over the Reichenbach Falls, he may not have been killed, but he was never quite the same man after. The differences in the pre- and post-Hiatus Holmes have in fact created speculation among those who play "The Game" making believe Sherlock Holmes was a historical person.

Among the more interesting and plausible theories: the later Holmes was in fact an impostor perhaps even Professor Moriarty , the later stories were fictions created to fill other writers' pockets this is often used to deal with the stories which supposedly are written by Holmes himself , and Holmes and Professor Moriarty were in fact a variation of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Among the more fanciful theories, the story The Case of the Detective's Smile by Mark Bourne, published in the anthology Sherlock Holmes in Orbit , posits that one of the places Holmes visited during his hiatus was Alice's Wonderland.

While there, he solved the case of the stolen tarts, and his experiences there contributed to his kicking the cocaine addiction. Baker Street Wiki Explore. Fan Fiction, art and other fanworks.

Behind the Scenes. Writers Directors Actors Crew. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Sherlock Holmes. View source. History Talk 0. This article is for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character. For other versions of the character see Versions of Sherlock Holmes. Watson : " Which is it today?