Arthur Conan Doyle killed his own character

Arthur Conan Doyle, was such a famous writer that his works brought him into both a remarkable achievement and a lifelong frustration. While one of his masterpieces, Sherlock Holmes, became one of the most recognizable figures in literature, the man behind the detective lived a more complicated life marked by ambition, contradiction, and struggle to step out of his own creation's shadow. More than a century after his death, his name immediately evokes the image of Sherlock Holmes: the brilliant detective, the master of deduction and reason.

Born in Edinburgh in 1859, Doyle studied and initially worked as a surgeon at a time when scientific progress seemed capable of explaining every mystery of the world. One of his professors, Joseph Bell, was renowned for drawing conclusions from the smallest details about his patients. Bell's methods would later inspire Sherlock Holmes, whose investigations were based on observation, logic, and evidence rather than intuition or luck. Sherlock Holmes’s methods were also used later to inspire what we today so-called ‘the modern detective’, the one with the long coat and the pipe who is able to deduce everything from far above.

When the novel was first introduced, in small parts in a newspaper in 1887, readers were extremely fascinated and astonished by a character that used scientific methods to understand pragmatic issues and to solve critical and cryptical problems. Maybe it really was the personality and quality building of the main character that transformed the figure of the detective into something more sophisticated and intellectually appealing. However, while for many writers such a gain of popularity would have been seen as a gift, for Doyle it was a symbol of important frustrations that led him panicking and killing his own character.

The writer didn’t like Sherlock Holmes anymore. He thought that through this detective he became such an unpleasant and unprofessional person, he didn’t want to be seen only as a crime author since his consideration of himself were about literature, theatre and he was also deeply influenced by historical records of the time. In fact, apart from Sherlock Holmes, his true identity relied on a higher regard than something so simple as Sherlock Holmes, a normal but strong person living just at 221 Baker Street. As a consequence of the popularity of detective growth, Doyle set boundaries by making a final decision.

In 1893 he wrote “the final problem” where he killed his own character. “The final problem” explores the death of both Sherlock Holmes and his rival the professor Moriarty concluding the story and letting Doyle devote to other projects. Instead, he provoked public malcontent. Readers wrote angry letters, the newspapers were upset, Doyle didn’t warn anyone. He just wanted to be recognised as a true author rather than ‘the one who wrote Sherlock’s adventures’ and even though the public wasn’t happy, he never returned to his decision. Someone assumed that he did since he wrote another story later in 1903, but the set was previous to “The final problem”.

In addition, it’s believed that Doyle explained that Sherlock Holmes wasn’t really dead in 1893, swearing a return of his adventures, a return that never happened.

Vivian Evelyn Nyx