The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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Sherlock Holmes. The name is ubiquitous, familiar to everyone in the world whether or not they've read of his exploits. Pretty impressive for a fictional character created more than 120 years ago.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Holmes in the late-nineteenth century, with the first adventure, A Study in Scarlet, appearing in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. Conan Doyle's entire output of fiction featuring Holmes consists of only four novels and fifty-six stories [1]-a staggeringly small body of work considering the tremendous influence Holmes has had-but something about the detective captured the reading public's imagination like no other character of his era, and he has continued to delight and captivate readers ever since.

Holmes, the world's first (and most famous) consulting detective, was one of the first great literary action-adventure heroes whose defining qualities were his intelligence and deductive reasoning rather than bravery or brawn. Which is not to say that Holmes is a coward or a weakling; being well-versed in the art of boxing and the martial art of Bartitsu [2], he is capable of besting almost anyone in a fight-he'd just rather outwit you than beat you up.

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