Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories about Sherlock Holmes, largely to fund work he considered more serious. He killed Holmes off in 1893 and was pressured into reviving him. The detective’s method — observe before theorising, distrust the obvious, eliminate the impossible — has outgrown the fiction entirely and now turns up in medical training and engineering post-mortems. Two cautions for quoters: Doyle wrote British spellings such as “theorise”, and “Elementary, my dear Watson” appears nowhere in the canon. Quotes here are cited by story or chapter and checked against the original texts.