Sherlock Holmes and shooting

I don't recall that one, been a long time since I've read the Holmes stories. But I do remember with respect to the hound of the Baskervilles, he "blew its brains out".

Been a long time since I read any Holmes, the only such thing I recall is as given in your link:

"I have always held, too, that pistol practice should distinctly be an open-air pastime; and when Holmes in one of his queer humours would sit in an arm-chair, with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.”

I don't know about a silver platter.

I always felt sorry for poor Sir Conan Doyle. He created a character he couldn't stand, couldn't kill, and the sillier and stupider and more disjointed the stories got, the more the public loved him.

Not sure which story the silver platter was in, but I do remember reading it.

pax

Here's something you may enjoy

http://members.aol.com/forensicb/Holmes1.html

pax said:

always felt sorry for poor Sir Conan Doyle. He created a character he couldn't stand, couldn't kill, and the sillier and stupider and more disjointed the stories got, the more the public loved him.

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Huh?

The fact that Doyle describes "pock marks" rather than holes would seem to indicate he did know something about the .450.

Jim

Nathaniel ~

Well, I've been wrong before.

Phantom Warrior ~

Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, hated the character he'd created. The stories are positively full of contradictions and chock-full of evidence that Doyle simply did not want to be bothered with looking stuff up or making anything he wrote match anything else. Watson's "old war wound," for example, drifts inexplicably from his shoulder to his leg and then back again. The dates given in one story cannot usually be reconciled to events not just in other stories, but often to details given within the same story.

Doyle kept writing because the public kept demanding he write, and because he needed the money. But he tried to break free of Holmes at least once, shoving him over a cliff along with Holmes' arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty. Problem was, Doyle continued to need money, and the public continued to clamor for new Holmes stories. Doyle finally relented and brought Holmes back, with a flimsy and utterly stupid tale to explain his apparent death. The public loved it anyway.

What Doyle wanted to write was serious literature. Apparently his talent for that was negligible, but a century later, people still read Holmes. Doyle would weep.

pax

What Doyle wanted to write was serious literature. Apparently his talent for that was negligible, but a century later, people still read Holmes. Doyle would weep.

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Some of his other stories are fun too, but a bit fortean to be "serious literature".

"I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do toward pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day" - A. C. Doyle


The public wanted more, the publisher wanted more, everybody wanted more. I've seen the number 20,000 given as the number of subscriptions lost by the Strand magazine after Doyle killed off Holmes.

It appears that he would have been much happier writing about faeries and the occult than Holmes. He even insisted his friend Harry Houdini had supernatural powers, although Houdini denied it.

John

When the American playwrite William Gillette asked Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for permission to take a bit of liberty with Holmes in a play Doyle sent him back a rather terse note saying something like "Yes, you may marry him, kill him; do whatever you damn well want to him."
Doyle had been a pugilist and sailor, as well as being trained in the medical profession. In 1927 he appeared in a short sound film explaining how he created Holmes, but more importantly to him, his devotion to supernatural causes. Sherllock Holmes had been modeled after one of Doyle's Edinburgh University medical professors, a Dr. William Bell. Many of the affectations Holmes possessed were lifted from Dr. Bell. Bell would examine the mud on some student's boots and proceed to tell him the path he had taken to the university that morning. To Holmes fans, this is..."elementary" but it did surprise the students in the class in that day.
Doyle was a fairly prolific writer and in many ways it's sad most people know him only for his Sherlock Holmes stories. His Professor Challenger stories were also interesting, and one has been made into several versions of the movie THE LOST WORLD.
He did come to despise Holmes, but I understand by the time he died he was fairly reconciled with the fact Holmes would always be his greatest creation.

Dr. Joseph Bell, actually.

There are a lot of authors in Doyle's predicament. Agatha Christie couldn't stand Hercule Poirot. C.S. Forester was thoroughly sick of Horatio Hornblower. And quite possibly Voldemort is going to chicken-fry Harry Potter in the last book.

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And then there's James Bond and Ian Fleming.

I've never figured out if Fleming committed suicide because he was tired of living, or just tired of Bond. Or maybe thoroughly disgusted with what Hollywood had done with Bond ...

Robert Hairless said:

Dr. Joseph Bell, actually.

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Yup. My goof. I call these things "brainfarts." I get 'em every once in awhile....comes with getting older.