Oscar Wilde dies.

1901 Queen Victoria dies.
1902 The Hound of the Baskervilles, a Holmes novel set before “The Final Problem” (1893), is published. Conan Doyle’s work in a field hospital and his treatise on the Boer War, The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, earn him a knighthood.
1903 New Holmes stories begin to appear in the Strand Magazine.
1905 The story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes is published.
1906 Louise dies of tuberculosis at age forty-nine. Conan Doyle begins investigations that will exonerate George Edalji, a man who had been wrongfully accused and sent to jail. Sir Nigel, a companion piece to The White Company (1891), is published.
1907 Conan Doyle marries Jean Leckie. Through the Magic Door, about the importance of books in his life, is published.
1909 The Crime of the Congo, about Belgian atrocities in the Congo, is published.
1910 Conan Doyle investigates the case of Oscar Slater, another wrong fully accused man. E. M. Forster’s Howards End is published.
1912 The Lost World is published; the first of a series of science fiction novels featuring the skeptical Professor George Edward Chal lenger, it is the best known of the author’s non-Holmes stories.
1913 The second Challenger novel, The Poison Belt, is published.
1914 Conan Doyle visits New York City and Canada. World War I be gins. James Joyce’s Dubliners is published.
1915 The final Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, is published.
1916 Conan Doyle announces his belief in spiritualism, which holds that the spirit has a life after the death of the body; he will become one of its best-known advocates. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is published.
1917 The Holmes story collection His Last Bow is published.
1918 The author’s eldest son, Kingsley, dies from war wounds and in fluenza. World War I ends. Conan Doyle publishes The New Rev elation, his first book on spiritualism. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poems is published.
1919 Conan Doyle’s brother, Innes, dies from pneumonia. Another book on spiritualism, The Vital Message, is published.
1920 From this year until his death, the author acts as an advocate for spiritualism.
1921 Conan Doyle’s mother, Mary, dies. Jean experiments with auto matic writing.
1922 Conan Doyle tours America in support of spiritualism. T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and James Joyce’s Ulysses are published.
1924 Conan Doyle’s autobiography, Memories and Adventures, is pub lished.
1926 The last Challenger novel, The Land of Mist, is published, as is Conan Doyle’s two-volume History of Spiritualism.
1927 The final Holmes story collection, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, is published. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is pub lished.
1930 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dies on July 7 at his home in Sussex from an illness resulting from a heart attack.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived an interesting life by any standard. As a young ship’s surgeon he sailed the Arctic in a whaling ship, and later he steamed down the west coast of Africa on a cargo vessel. In midlife his fame as a writer opened doors all over the world. He showed some finer points of golf to Rudyard Kipling in a Vermont field, and argued in the newspapers with his neighbor, Bernard Shaw, about the Titanic. He climbed the top of the Great Pyramid in Giza, and lectured the deacons in the Great Mormon Tabernacle in Utah. As a champion of spiritualism he proclaimed that a pharaoh’s curse could indeed have caused the death of Lord Carnarvon, the patron of the Tutankhamun expedition, and assured the public that Agatha Christie, who had mysteriously disappeared, would show up safe and sound because a psychic to whom he had taken one of her gloves predicted it. He was knighted by King Edward VII for writing a pamphlet justifying the British cause in the Boer War. He wrote what he thought were important historical novels in the manner of Sir Walter Scott and through them hoped to establish his legacy. Ironically enough, all these events have a chance to be remembered only because he also created what he regarded as “a lower stratum of literary achievement,” his peerless detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes has become as famous as any character in literature. His name is synonymous with brilliant deduction. Call someone “Sherlock” and everyone knows what you mean.