Sherlock Holmes.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVI, Issue VII, 16 February 1901, Page 287

Sherlock Holmes.

DR. DOYLE TELLS THE HISTORY OF A GREAT IDEA.

The idea of Sherlock Holmes was. says Dr. Conan Doyle in the thousandth number of ”Tit-Bits,” suggested by a professor under whom he had worked in Edinburgh, and in part by Edgar Allen Poe’s detectives, which, after all, ran on the lines of all other detectives who have appeared in literature. “In wofk which consists in the drawing of detectives there are only one or two qualities which one can use. and an author is forced to hark back upon them constantly, so that every detective must really resemble every other detective to a greater or less extent. There is no great originality required in devising or constructing such a man, and the only possible originality which one can get into a story about a detective is in giving him original plots and problems to solve, as in his equipment there must be of necessity an alert acuteness of mind to grasp facts and the relation which each of them bears

to the other. “At the time I first thought of a detective—it was about 1886—-I had been reading some detective stories, and it struck me what nonsense they were, because for getting the solution of the mystery the authors always depended on some coincidence. This struck me as not a fair way of playing the game, Itecause the detective ought really to depend for his success on something in his own mind and not on merely adventitious circumstances, which do not by any means always occur in real life. “For fun, therefore, I started constructing a story, and giving my detective a scientific system, so as to make him reason everything out. Intellectually that had been done before by Edgar Allan Poe with M. Dupin, but where Holmes differed from Dupin was that he had an immense fund of exact knowledge to draw upon in consequence of his previous scientific education. I mean by this, that by looking at a man’s hand he knew what the man’s trade was, as by looking at his trousers leg he could deduce the character of the man. He was practical and he was systematic, and his success in the detection of crime was to be the fruit, not of luck, but of his qualities.” Dr. Doyle explains his reasons for bringing the detective series to an end. “I was still a young man and a young novelist, and I have always noticed that the ruin of every novelist who has come up has been effected by driving him into a groove. . . . Now, why should a man be driven into a groove and not write about what interests him? “My objection to detective stories is that they only call for the use of a certain portion of one’s imaginative faculty, the invention of a plot, without giving any scope for character drawing. “The best literary work is that which leaves the reader better frr btaving read it. Now. nobody can possibly be the better—in the high sense in which T mean it—for rending Sherlock Holmes, although he may have passed a pleasant hour in doing so.”