the complete illustrated sherlock holmes

Finally, in The Empty Room', the first story in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, he restored Holmes to life. There was a huge public reaction, with 20,000 subscriptions to the Strand magazine cancelled, but Doyle resisted the pressure to bring back his finest creation until 1902, when he released The Hound of the Baskervilles, a full-length novel set earlier in Holmes' career. Despite the huge popularity of the Holmes stories, Doyle felt they detracted from his other, more serious writing, so in the last story of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894) The Final Problem', Doyle killed off Holmes in a final, fatal confrontation with the arch-villain, Professor Moriarty. This was followed by a second novel, The Sign of the Four (1890), and the first collection of short stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), all of which were first published in the Strand Magazine. The first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was written in 1886 over a three week period and published a year later. His father died in an asylum in 1893 after being institutionalized for some years. In 1884 he married Louise Hawkins and qualified as a doctor in 1885 after which he practised as an eye specialist near Portsmouth until 1891, when he became a full-time writer. Doyle attended the Jesuit Stonyhurst College but had abandoned his family's Catholicism by the time he had completed his medical studies at Edinburgh University. In order to supplement his income (he was an unsuccessful architect) his father painted and made illustrated books. Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859, the son of Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary (Foley) Doyle, both practising Roman Catholics.

The complete illustrated sherlock holmes