He convinced Doyle, at a dinner party in 1889, to write a second novel featuring the detective, for serialisation in the magazine. The second Sherlock Holmes novel was the result of a dinner party with Oscar Wilde. One person who had admired the first novel was the editor Joseph Stoddart, who edited Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. It didn’t sell well, and more or less sank without trace.ģ. The novel was rejected by many publishers and eventually published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual (named after the husband of Mrs Beeton, of the book of cookery and household management). Doyle wrote the book while he was running a struggling doctor’s surgery down in Portsmouth. Auguste Dupin, two of whose adventures we include in our pick of Poe’s best short stories. Famously, Doyle was inspired by a real-life lecturer of his at the University of Edinburgh, Dr Joseph Bell, who could diagnose patients simply by looking at them when they walked into his surgery the other important influence on the creation of Sherlock Holmes was Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective, C. The detective made his debut in the novel A Study in Scarlet (1887), written by a twenty-seven-year-old Doyle in just three weeks. The first Sherlock Holmes novel was something of a flop. For more on the creation of Holmes, see the detailed ‘Introduction’ in The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes.Ģ. Doyle was also a keen cricketer himself, and between 18 he played ten first-class matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club – quite fitting, since Baker Street is situated in the Marylebone district of London. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Holmes (of course), was a fan of cricket and the name ‘Sherlock’ appears to have stuck in his memory. The name was altered to Sherlock, possibly because of a cricketer who bore the name. Sherlock Holmes was originally going to be called Sherrinford. For more great facts about popular fictional characters, check out our pick of the most interesting Harry Potter facts and our fascinating facts about Romeo and Juliet.ġ. If you like these facts, have a read of the sequel to this post which gathers together further little-known facts about the great sleuth. This post is the first part of a two-part bumper post featuring interesting facts about Sherlock Holmes.