Haunted by the ghost of Sherlock Holmes
From our UK edition
When Sherlock Holmes first stalked across the pages of London periodicals in 1887, journalists eagerly asked Arthur Conan Doyle ‘how on earth he had evolved, apparently out of his own inner consciousness, such an extraordinary person’. But Conan Doyle soon put them right: ‘If you please, he is not evolved out of any one’s inner consciousness. Sherlock Holmes is the literary embodiment... of my memory of a professor of medicine at Edinburgh University.’ As a medical student, Conan Doyle had been taught by the surgeon and professor Joseph Bell, who had pioneered a deductive technique called ‘the Method’, based on the ‘vast importance of little distinctions, the endless significance of trifles’.
