The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes [antikvár]

Foreword Sherlock Holmes ! Ask anyone, anywhere, to tell 3^ou something about him, and the odds are that they will oblige you. His face is familiar to those who would not be able to identify a portrait of Shakespeare. Detection as an art was a mere child in his day, and has grown to manhood in our own time ; yet it is of Holmes that we think first when detection and detectives are mentioned. Celebrities come and go; the headline name of yesterday is forgotten today. Sherlock Holmes, defying time and the fickleness of the public, goes on for ever, a character of fiction. Many people find this hard to believe. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his creator, received many letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes, with requests to forward them. When Holmes 'retired' to keep bees in the country, several elderly ladies wrote to Conan Doyle applying for the job of Mr. Holmes's housekeeper. Earlier, when Holmes had plunged to seemingly certain death in the fearful chasm of the Reichenbach Falls, many of his readers went about for days in mourning clothes and wore black crepe armbands. The Poet Laureate, John Masefield, told us of 'the indescribable feeling of loss one had when it was thought Holmes would be no more'. Even today, more than three-quarters of a century after Sherlock Holmes's first appearance in print, there are those who still write to him at his famous London address— iB Baker Street. There can surely be no other character of legend still receiving mail from his admirers. Except, of 9