Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes

"After eliminating all impossible conclusions, the rest, no matter how bizarre and unbelievable, must be the truth, the irrefutable truth." Familiar? The owner of this sentence is Sherlock Holmes . In my mind, Sherlock Holmes is a god-like existence like Monkey King in " Journey to the West" and Bond in the 007 series. For more than 100 years, "Sherlock Holmes" has swept the world, and the symbol of Sherlock Holmes has become synonymous with detectives in people's hearts. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Sherlock Holmes is one of the most frequently screened literary characters in the world. Criminal forensics expert Li Changyu is good enough, but he can only "hold his thighs" - known as "contemporary Sherlock Holmes".

Conan Doyle, who shaped Sherlock Holmes, has 56 short detective stories and 4 novella detective novels in his life, all of which feature Sherlock Holmes as the protagonist. He is also regarded as the "father of detective fiction". The BBC even commented: "Without the famous work of Conan Doyle, there would be no modern fan culture."

Doyle was neither a professional, nor a full-time writer. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh Medical School, he became a doctor. But while studying medicine, Doyle met a teacher named Joseph Bell, who acted as a catalyst that greatly increased the rate of reactions when Doyle subsequently had a series of "chemical reactions" with literature. In the biography "The Life of Conan Doyle", Doyle confessed to the interviewer: "Sherlock Holmes is just a character in literature, and he (Sherlock Holmes) carries my message to a professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Memories." Doyle even said in a letter to Professor Bell: "You let me shape Sherlock Holmes." Why did he say this? It turns out that Professor Bell has a "special function": with just a glance, he can quickly infer what the patient is doing, where he is from, and even where he came to Edinburgh based on the patient's behavior, clothing and other details. . For example, if a patient did not take off his hat immediately after entering the room, Bell believed that the person should be a soldier who had just retired. At that time, only soldiers did not have the habit of taking off their hats when entering the room.

Professor Bell's "supernormal ability" deeply influenced Doyle's shaping of Sherlock Holmes, and appeared many times in his works, such as "...a tall, strong, gray-bearded and dignified man was Taken into the room. His somber countenance and arrogant attitude speaks volumes about his origins. From his shoe covers to his gold-rimmed glasses, he is a Conservative, a priest, a good citizen..." ("Westeria House")

Since 1882, Doyle has spent more than ten years in Plymouth hanging a pot to help the world, and his income is only enough to feed the world. "Life is very boring. My whole life is to try not to waste time in mediocrity." Driven by this idea, coupled with the motivation to improve the quality of life, Doyle tried to write novels for magazines to earn some extra money . As a writer with a rigorous and meticulous medical education, Doyle's writing style is like a doctor's diagnosis, quite scientifically professional. He was determined to create an unprecedented detective character based on reasoning and logic - and thus Sherlock Holmes was born. Doyle gave up medicine and started writing, but it didn't go well at first. His debut work, A Study in Scarlet , was rejected several times before it was published in the 1887 Beaton Christmas Annual in April 1886. The protagonist of the novel is Sherlock Holmes, who later became famous and swept the world. The remuneration for her debut novel was only £25, so Doyle was very upset and dared not post it in the circle of friends. So, he felt that he was a dignified angel in white, how could he make a living from it! In 1890, Doyle closed the clinic and went to Vienna to study ophthalmology. A year later, smug, he returned to metropolitan London to open an eye clinic. Unexpectedly, very few people came for consultation; more time, only he and the nurse stared wide-eyed. Doyle had to go back to his old business, continue to write Sherlock Holmes stories, and experimented with science fiction , historical fiction, emotional drama, poetry, and more.

With such a polarized life experience, Doyle successfully created the pair of Sherlock Holmes + Watson; similarly, Agatha Christie gave up being a singer and created Poirot + Hastings; Jackie Chan + Chris Tucker in "The Moment", Song Ci + Ying Gu in "The Great Song ", as well as Di Renjie + Yuan Fang, Bao Qingtian + Zhan Zhao and Gongsun Ce and other CPs all seem to follow the "Pong Miao + Amusement". "The basic model of this detective drama.

The biggest charm of mystery novels lies in the logical rationality and legality. Doyle not only achieved this, but also learned the grass snake and gray line in literary writing, knocking the mountain and shaking the tiger, echoing the beginning and the end, moving flowers and connecting trees, and anti-guests... His creative skills are skilled, and the "shaking of the burden" node is exquisite. , the vivid description of the scene, so that readers can not stop once they put on the "red shoes" of reading. This is also the reason why Sherlock Holmes has been adapted into the most films. Doyle's extraordinary ability lies in his speculation and imagination, which is close to that of a philosopher + a science fiction writer. His short story "The Ring of Thoth" revolves around the question of life and death in ancient Egyptian culture. This has also become one of the important creations of the "whale fall" of the mummy genre films that Hollywood back waves are competing for and adapting.

In addition to Sherlock Holmes, is there any other platform to achieve Doyle? Of course there is, the biggest of which is the British publisher George Newnes. It is said that Jin Yong specially founded Ming Pao in order to publish his martial arts novels . Newnes started Riverbank magazine in 1891, each issue consisting of multiple short stories and novellas, especially suited to the Sherlock Holmes series. In the end, the sales of "Riverbank" climbed to more than 500,000 copies, and Conan Doyle's remuneration also reached the highest level of literary works at that time, once rising to the sky-high price of 100 pounds per thousand words.

In addition to the aforementioned Joseph Bell, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh's Faculty of Medicine, Edinburgh's forensic examiner, health examiner, and autopsy officer Henry Duncan Littlejohn was nominated, on the grounds that Henry participated in almost all criminal investigations in Edinburgh at that time. Work, but also the first "fingerprint identification" and "photo evidence" in the history of criminal investigation.

Controversies about the prototype of Sherlock Holmes are as numerous as those of Jia Baoyu in "A Dream of Red Mansions". Others believe that Sherlock Holmes is a "mixture" of at least two people, on the grounds that "Sherlock" comes from a physician named Oliver Wendell Holmes, and "Sherlock" comes from Doyle's favorite music Home Alfred Sherlock.

But the most convincing thing is the "Bell Prototype Theory" - Bell did solve many major cases in his life, but after each case, he quietly hid in the corner and never made public. Sherlock Holmes also perfectly inherited this quality. In this way, Bell worked until the age of 64 before retiring. In 1911, the founder of modern forensic science passed away peacefully at home. In 1930, Conan Doyle died at the age of 71. Doyle's life can be said to be "forced to write novels on Liangshan, and he did not do a good job and bore fruit".

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