On the Trail of Sherlock Holmes

(HistoryNet) - One hundred and fifty years after Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was born, the workaholic, hawk-faced “consulting detective” with a penchant for violins, morphine and cocaine, remains an icon of English literature. (Fervent Sherlockians insist that Doyle was merely the literary agent in the set-up, while the slightly dim-witted Watson played Boswell to Holmes’ Johnson.) Doyle’s tales were not the first modern detective stories, but they helped to pioneer an infant genre and set a benchmark for so many colorful English detectives that followed, from Agatha Christie’s Poirot to Ian Rankin’s Rebus. Continued