Sherlock Holmes is a deep thinker and has a love for music especially the violin. He’s not always likeable and mite be considered to be cold and a loof. He’s not very sociable so he’s never married. Holmes relation with the police is considered to be on rocky grounds. Holmes relates to the police as imbeciles and thinks there useless.
Holmes is a man of action as well as a thinker. When Roylott comes to see him he doesn’t he doesn’t get intimidated. He also used the cane to fight the poisonous snake off and on the hand of john clay in the cellar. He has a gun when Moriatry visits plus he has knowledge of the criminal world.
Holmes main reason for working is so that he can escape boredom. Holmes also wants to free society of his arch enemy Moriarty and his organized crime. He considers what he’s doing to be public duty and very important in his life.
He has a very strong sense of morality and wants all wrong doers to be bright to justice. Holmes is not beyond taking justice into his own hands as in “The Speckled Band” when he indirectly causes Roylott’s death but it doesn’t worry him at all.
Watson is a more likeable character than Holmes. He is the narrator of all three stories in first person. Watson is more like the reader than Holmes in trying to solve the crimes in that we are always one step behind Holmes. Watson takes notes for Holmes as well as accompanying him to dangerous situations and even tales a gun with him. Watson is never busy as a doctor but has medical knowledge. He shares the same code of honour as Holmes’s rights and wrong.
The villains are less realistic than the characters of Holmes and Watson, using more exaggeration. Dr. Grimsby Roylott has a connection with gypsies and went to India with them and brought back dangerous exotic animals with are a red herring in the story. He is a doctor like Dr. Watson with specialist knowledge. He is a brutal bully who insults Sherlock Holmes. John Clay is the least developed of the three characters and a little like Moriatry with a sense of mystery, bright and intelligent. Moriarty is Sherlock Holmes’s equal adversary and a criminal genius (good gone wrong). Once he has lost most of his power he becomes even more dangerous on a professional level for Sherlock Holmes himself. Moriarty will devote his whole energies to revenging himself upon Holmes. He tracks Holmes down very effectively and seemingly, takes him to his death.
The Sherlock Holmes stories have a very unique setting and use of descriptive atmosphere. When Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson get to Reichenbach falls you get a very distinct sense of mystery, dangerous and dramatic like we as the reader kind of guess what’s going to happen. There is lots of detail to London, Baker Street, country house with varied settings to give tremendous atmosphere and mystery. This comes into effect in the “Red Headed League” and “The Final Point” especially.
The style and structure is very simple, it’s written in first person narrator by Dr. Watson. Direct speech brings alive different charters and personalities. Descriptions of charters and settings are a reason to the plot. “The Speckled Band” is a muscular mystery, the “Red Headed League” is to do with the values of property and money, “The Final Point” is politics and crime put together and they all have a moral code at the heart of the stories which is to bring bad people to justice. “The Speckled Band” and “Red Headed League” has a straight forward structure with the problem introduced and eventually solved by Holmes. However in “The Final Point” Dr. Watson is forced to use detective powers demonstrated to him by his friend Holmes in realising both Holmes and Moriatry are dead.
Between 1887 and 1927, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote sixty Sherlock Holmes stories, and his great Canon has become the most praised, most studied, and best-known chapter in the history of detective fiction. Over twenty thousand publications pertaining to the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon are known to have been published, most of them historical and critical studies. In addition, however, almost since the first stories appeared, such was their uniqueness and extraordinary attraction that other authors began writing stories based on or derived from them. A new genre had appeared: pastiches; parodies; burlesques; and stories that attempted to copy or rival the great detective himself. This is why Sherlock Holmes is the most popular, entertaining and strong examples of popular crime writing which is still read a century later.
