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The Complete of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland, to an English father, Charles Altamont Doyle, and an Irish mother, Mary Foley, who had married in 1855. Although he is now referred to as “Conan Doyle”, the origin of this compound surname is uncertain. Conan Doyle’s father was an artist, as were his paternal uncles (one of whom was Richard Doyle), and his paternal grandfather John Doyle.

A STUDY IN SCARLET (LIT Format)
Part 1: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department
1. Mr. Sherlock Holmes
2. The Science of Deduction
3. The Lauriston Garden Mystery
4. What John Rance Had to Tell
5. Our Advertisement Brings a Visitor
6. Tobias Gregson Shows What He Can Do
7. Light in the Darkness

Part 2: The Country of the Saints
1. On the Great Alkali Plain
2. The Flower of Utah
3. John Ferrier Talks with the Prophet
4. A Flight for Life
5. The Avenging Angels
6. A Continuation of the Reminiscences of John Watson, M.D.
7. The Conclusion

THE SIGN OF FOUR (LIT Format)
1. The Science of Deduction
2. The Statement of the Case
3. In Quest of a Solution
4. The Story of the Bald-headed Man
5. The Tragedy of Pondicherry Lodge
6. Sherlock Holmes Gives a Demonstartion
7. The Episode of the Barrel
8. The Baker Street Irregulars
9. A Break in the Chain
10. The End of the Islander
11. The Great Agra Treasure
12. The Strange Story of Jonathan Small

ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (LIT Format)
A Scandal in Bohemia
The Red-headed League
A Case of Identity
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
The Five Orange Pips
The Man with the Twisted Lip
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (LIT Format)
Silver Blaze
The Yellow Face
The Stock-broker’s Clerk
The “Gloria Scott”
The Musgrave Ritual
The Reigate Puzzle
The Crooked Man
The Resident Patient
The Greek Interpreter
The Naval Treaty
The Final Problem

THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (LIT Format)
The Adventure of the Empty House
The Adventure of the Norwood Builder
The Adventure of the Dancing Men
The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
The Adventure of the Priory School
The Adventure of Black Peter
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
The Adventure of the Six Napoleons
The Adventure of the Three Students
The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez
The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
The Adventure of the Abbey Grange
The Adventure of the Second Stain

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (LIT Format)
1. Mr. Sherlock Holmes
2. The Curse of the Baskervilles
3. The Problem
4. Sir Henry Baskerville
5. Three Broken Threads
6. Baskerville Hall
7. The Stapletons of the Merripit House
8. First Report of Dr. Watson
9. Second Report of Dr. Watson
10. Extract from the Diary of Dr. Watson
11. The Man on the Tor
12. Death on the Moor
13. Fixing the Nets
14. The Hound of the Baskervilles
15. A Retrospection

THE VALLEY OF FEAR (LIT Format)
Part 1: The Tragedy of Birlstone
1. The Warning
2. Sherlock Holmes Discourses
3. The Tragedy of Birlstone
4. Darkness
5. The People of the Drama
6. A Dawning Light
7. The Solution

Part 2: The Scowres
1. The Man
2. The Bodymaster
3. Lodge 341, Vermissa
4. The Valley of Fear
5. The Darkest Hour
6. Danger
7. The Trapping of Biry Edwards
Epilogue

THE CASE-BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (PDF Format)
The Adventure of the Illustrious Client
The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier
The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone
The Adventure of the Three Gables
The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire
The Adventure of the Three Garridebs
The Problem of Thor Bridge
The Adventure of the Creeping Man
The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane
The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger
The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place
The Adventure of the Retired Colourman

HIS LAST BOW (LIT Format)
The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge
1. The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles
2. The Tiger of San Pedro
The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
The Adventure of the Red Circle
The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans
The Adventure of the Dying Detective
The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax
The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot
His Last Bow

Conan Doyle was sent to the Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school St. Mary’s Hall, Stonyhurst, at the age of eight. He then went on to Stonyhurst College, but by the time he left the school in 1875, he had rejected Christianity to become an agnostic.
From 1876 to 1881 he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, including a period working in the town of Aston (now a district of Birmingham). While studying, he also began writing short stories; his first published story appeared in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal before he was 20.^[3] Following his term at university, he served as a ship’s doctor on a voyage to the West African coast. He completed his doctorate on the subject of tabes dorsalis in 1885.^[4]
In 1882, he joined former classmate George Budd as his partner at a medical practice in Plymouth, but their relationship proved difficult, and Conan Doyle soon left to set up an independent practice.^[5] Arriving in Portsmouth in June of that year with less than £10 to his name, he set up a medical practice at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea.^[6] The practice was initially not very successful; while waiting for patients, he again began writing stories. His first significant work was A Study in Scarlet, which appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887 and featured the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, who was partially modelled after his former university professor, Joseph Bell. Future short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes were published in the English Strand Magazine. Interestingly, Rudyard Kipling congratulated Conan Doyle on his success, asking “Could this be my old friend, Dr. Joe?” Sherlock Holmes, however, was even more closely modelled after the famous Edgar Allan Poe character, C. Auguste Dupin.
While living in Southsea he played football for an amateur side (that disbanded in 1894), Portsmouth Association Football Club. (This club had no connection with the Portsmouth F.C. of today.)
In 1885, he married Louisa (or Louise) Hawkins, known as “Touie”, who suffered from tuberculosis and died on 4 July 1906.^[7] He married Jean Leckie in 1907, whom he had first met and fallen in love with in 1897 but had maintained a platonic relationship with her out of loyalty to his first wife. Conan Doyle had five children, two with his first wife (Mary Louise (born 1889) and Alleyne Kingsley (1892 – 1918)) and three with his second wife (Jean Lena Annette, Denis Percy Stewart (17 March 1909 – 9 March 1955), second husband in 1936 of Georgian Princess Nina Mdivani (circa 1910 – 19 February 1987) (former sister-in-law of Barbara Hutton), and Adrian Malcolm).
In 1890, Conan Doyle studied the eye in Vienna; he moved to London in 1891 to set up a practice as an ophthalmologist. He wrote in his autobiography that not a single patient crossed his door. This gave him more time for writing, and in November 1891 he wrote to his mother: “I think of slaying Holmes… and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.” His mother responded, saying, “You may do what you deem fit, but the crowds will not take this lightheartedly.” In December 1893, he did so in order to dedicate more of his time to more “important” works (his historical novels).
Holmes and Moriarty apparently plunged to their deaths together down a waterfall in the story, “The Final Problem“. Public outcry led him to bring the character back; Conan Doyle returned to the story in “The Adventure of the Empty House”, with the explanation that only Moriarty had fallen but, since Holmes had other dangerous enemies, he had arranged to be temporarily “dead” also. Holmes ultimately appears in a total of 56 short stories and four Conan Doyle novels (he has since appeared in many novels and stories by other authors).
Following the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century and the condemnation from around the world over the United Kingdom’s conduct, Conan Doyle wrote a short pamphlet titled, The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, which justified the UK’s role in the Boer war, and was widely translated.
Conan Doyle believed that it was this pamphlet that resulted in 1902 in his being knighted and appointed Deputy-Lieutenant of Surrey. He also in 1900 wrote the longer book, The Great Boer War. During the early years of the 20th century, Sir Arthur twice ran for Parliament as a Liberal Unionist, once in Edinburgh and once in the Hawick Burghs, but although he received a respectable vote he was not elected.
Conan Doyle was involved in the campaign for the reform of the Congo Free State, led by the journalist E. D. Morel and the diplomat Roger Casement. He wrote The Crime of the Congo in 1909, a long pamphlet in which he denounced the horrors in that country. He became acquainted with Morel and Casement, taking inspiration from them for two of the main characters in the novel, The Lost World (1912).
He broke with both when Morel became one of the leaders of the pacifist movement during the First World War, and when Casement committed treason against the UK during the Easter Rising out of conviction for his Irish nationalist views. Conan Doyle tried, unsuccessfully, to save Casement from the death penalty, arguing that he had been driven mad and was not responsible for his actions.
Conan Doyle was also a fervent advocate of justice, and personally investigated two closed cases, which led to two imprisoned men being released. The first case, in 1906, involved a shy half-British, half-Indian lawyer named George Edalji, who had allegedly penned threatening letters and mutilated animals. Police were set on Edalji’s conviction, even though the mutilations continued after their suspect was jailed.
It was partially as a result of this case that the Court of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907, so not only did Conan Doyle help George Edalji, his work helped establish a way to correct other miscarriages of justice. The story of Conan Doyle and Edalji is told in fictional form in Julian Barnes‘ 2005 novel, Arthur & George.
The second case, that of Oscar Slater, a German Jew and gambling-den operator convicted of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman in Glasgow in 1908, excited Conan Doyle’s curiosity because of inconsistencies in the prosecution case and a general sense that Slater was framed.
After the death of his wife Louisa in 1906, and the deaths of his son Kingsley, his brother Innes, his two brothers-in-law, and his two nephews shortly after World War I, Conan Doyle sank into depression. He found solace supporting Spiritualism and its alleged scientific proof of existence beyond the grave.
According to the History Channel program Houdini: Unlocking the Mystery (which briefly explored the friendship between the two), Conan Doyle became involved with Spiritualism after the deaths of his son and his brother. Kingsley Doyle died from pneumonia on 28 October 1918, which he contracted during his convalescence after being seriously wounded during the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Brigadier-General Innes Doyle died in February 1919, also from pneumonia. Sir Arthur became involved with Spiritualism to the extent that he wrote a Professor Challenger novel on the subject, The Land of Mist.
His book, The Coming of the Fairies (1921) shows he was apparently convinced of the veracity of the Cottingley Fairies photographs, which he reproduced in the book, together with theories about the nature and existence of fairies and spirits.
In his The History of Spiritualism (1926) Conan Doyle praised the psychic phenomena and spirit materialisations produced by Eusapia Palladino and Mina “Margery” Crandon.^[8]
His work on this topic was one of the reasons that one of his short story collections, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929 for supposed occultism. This ban was later lifted. Russian actor Vasily Livanov later received an Order of the British Empire for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle was friends for a time with the American magician Harry Houdini, who himself became a prominent opponent of the Spiritualist movement in the 1920s following the death of his beloved mother. Although Houdini insisted that Spiritualist mediums employed trickery (and consistently attempted to expose them as frauds), Conan Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers, a view expressed in Conan Doyle’s The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini was apparently unable to convince Conan Doyle that his feats were simply magic tricks, leading to a bitter public falling out between the two.
Richard Milner, an American historian of science, has presented a case that Conan Doyle may have been the perpetrator of the Piltdown Man hoax of 1912, creating the counterfeit hominid fossil that fooled the scientific world for over 40 years. Milner says that Conan Doyle had a motive, namely revenge on the scientific establishment for debunking one of his favourite psychics, and that The Lost World contains several encrypted clues regarding his involvement in the hoax.^[9]
Samuel Rosenberg’s 1974 book Naked is the Best Disguise purports to explain how Conan Doyle left, throughout his writings, open clues that related to hidden and suppressed aspects of his mentality.
Conan Doyle was found clutching his chest in the family garden on 7 July 1930. He soon died of his heart attack, aged 71, and is buried in the Church Yard at Minstead in the New Forest, Hampshire, England. His last words were directed toward his wife: “You are wonderful.” The epitaph on his gravestone reads:
STEEL TRUE BLADE STRAIGHT ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE KNIGHT PATRIOT, PHYSICIAN & MAN OF LETTERS Undershaw, the home Conan Doyle had built near Hindhead, south of London, and lived in for at least a decade, was a hotel and restaurant from 1924 until 2004. It was then bought by a developer, and has been empty since then while conservationists and Conan Doyle fans fight to preserve it.^[7] A statue honours Conan Doyle at Crowborough Cross in Crowborough, East Sussex, England, where Sir Arthur lived for 23 years. There is also a statue of Sherlock Holmes in Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, close to the house where Conan Doyle was born.

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| 23.10.2008 |

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