Free Republic

The first ever mention of Sherlock Holmes came in A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887. Dr Watson is looking for lodgings, and meets an old acquaintance who knows of someone he could share with, but does not recommend. More than 130 years on, Holmes remains Watson’s, and our, almost constant companion. Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective landed a Guinness World Record for the most frequently portrayed human literary character in film and television in 2012, beaten only by the (non-human) Dracula. He remains enduringly popular on screen: when Benedict Cumberbatch plunged off the roof at the...

The game is still afoot. Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth, on Picardy Street in Edinburgh, Scotland, of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle died in 1930, but Holmes and Dr. Watson live on. Every day, some child's imagination vanishes into the foggy depths of Victorian England and accompanies Holmes in pursuit of mysteries and malefactors. Descend just once into that world with Holmes and the memory is marked for life. Some 200 movies have been made starring Sherlock Holmes - he is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most frequently portrayed...

New York: Sherlock Holmes, the detective famed for his icy logic, is hot again, brought back to life by authors who believe the supremely rational character strikes a chord in this age of post-9/11 uncertainty. Seventy-five years after the death of his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes is popping up in historical locales from Hiroshima to Holocaust-haunted Europe in recent portrayals by literary-minded US writers. Caleb Carr's "The Italian Secretary," a novel commissioned by Conan Doyle's estate, hit book stores last month, following Mitch Cullin's "A Slight Trick of the Mind," featuring the sleuth amid the debris of the world's...