Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The poem "Night Voices" is a simple four-stanza poem that can be interpreted many ways. Although it starts innocently enough, with the children asking their father about sounds that seem to be...

Night Voices is one creepy poem. The first two stanzas seem to be a conversation between a young child and his (the gender isn't clear, but let's assume it is a young boy for the sake of...

In The Adventure of the Speckled Band, Holmes is observant. Of course, this applies to him in ALL of the stories, but in this particular one, in the very beginning, he uses his powers of...

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “How It Happened,” a spiritual medium, able to communicate with the dead, narrates a first-hand report from a wealthy dead man. The man had owned a brand new...

Ryder is the thief who is found to have stolen the blue carbuncle in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle." However, at the end of the story after Ryder has confessed himself and begged, "God help...

I think the relationship between these two famous literary figures is captured through the way that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson actually act as foils for each other in all of their adventures. A...

"The Adventure of the Dying Detective" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was first published in 1913 and is part of the continuing saga of the adventures of Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes. In the story,...

Colonel Barclay and his wife have a serious disagreement after she accidentally meets a man from her past while in the company of her friend, Miss Morrison. Upon returning home, Mrs. Barclay, named...

It should be noted that the story opens with two short sentences: She was a writing medium. This is what she wrote:-- A medium is a person who can supposedly communicate with the dead, so a...

Miss Mary Sutherland is said to have a "preposterous hat and...vacuous face." She is a lady of some small fortune of "a hundred a year," left her by her uncle, who makes a living by taking...

In one of his strangest stories, "The Five Orange Pips" a mystery goes unsolved and the client of Sherlock Holmes dies before Holmes can divert the killer. The client is John Openshaw, the son of...

This quote comes from "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," in which James McCarthy is accused of murdering his father Charles. The circumstantial evidence points to it being "obvious" that James killed...

If a "clue" means a piece of hard evidence—an object—we will not find ten of them in many detective stories, since few criminals are that careless. If, however, we include multiple deductions from...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a convinced believer in spiritualism, which is based on the belief that human souls live on after death and that living persons can communicate with them, usually through...

Imagery is description using any of the five senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Some examples of imagery in the story include the following: I remember so well walking down the...

The writing in Sherlock Holmes books is pretty standard. For the most part, it is the same English we use today. It I just a little more old-fashioned. However, I would say the greatest...

Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles is a detective or mystery story with strong Gothic elements. Set on the bleak moors of Dartmoor, England, the tale features a ghostly hound that...

Holmes uses a "brain attic," goes by himself to think, and uses a pipe to focus. Sherlock Holmes is very good at focusing. He has some techniques that he has developed over the years. One such...

In "A Case of Mistaken Identity," the evidence of Hosmer Angel's identity started building with the revelation of the motive for the mystery: Miss Mary Sutherland has a small fortune that she lets...

James Ryder's not exactly a master criminal. He's certainly not in the same league as Moriarty—that's for sure. He's really just an opportunist who saw his chance and took it. As an attendant...

In "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," Sherlock Holmes' client is a lady named Helen Stoner. She had witnessed her twin sister Julia Stoner die in their house and the only clue to the cause of...

We are not told for certain why the Ku Klux Klan wanted to kill these three men, but Holmes has a theory. He notes that the KKK started to fall apart right after the time that Colonel Elias...

In this 1892 short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a combination of coincidences and mix-ups allow Sherlock Holmes to solve the mystery of a stolen carbuncle, a precious gem. The Christmas season,...

Sherlock Holmes was an early version of a super CSI! He solved cases by his keen powers of observation AND by science. He used logic and facts to formulate his hypothesis and then proceeded to...

With the title, "How It Happened," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sets up his readers to expect that they will read a straightforward narrative of a significant event, and the bulk of the story is just...

The Ku Klux Klan was a real group that did spring up after the Civil War in the United States. At the time that it began it was dedicated to ending the Northern rule of the South during...

A discussion about the "How it Happened" summary must begin with the knowledge that we have a nameless, first person narrator who has a chauffeur named Perkins. Our narrator is returning from...

In The Speckled Band Helen Stoner comes to Sherlock Holmes to request help in solving the mystery of her sister's death. Her sister died after getting engaged; her death was mysterious and Helen...

Aside from his lightning-quick deductive technique, his vast knowledge of ephemera and his astounding ability for disguise, Holmes is also compelling because of his ‘dark side’. He is an opium...

In The Speckled Band, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the independent detective Sherlock Holmes is visited by a woman who is afraid she will soon die. She finds...

In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Five Orange Pips" by Arthur Conan Doyle, a man named John Openshaw comes to Holmes and Watson because his uncle Elias Openshaw was murdered, and he now considers...

Somewhere in his novel Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov quotes a little rhyming maxim for writers as follows: The "I" in the story Cannot die in the story. In other words, if a story is being told...

Charles McCarthy and John Turner, residents of Boscombe Valley, had lived in Australia at the same time. They met when John Turner and his gang of thieves was robbing a gold convoy that McCarthy...

Having decided to kill off his greatest literary creation, Arthur Conan Doyle was determined to make sure that he would go out in style. With that in mind, he chose a suitably dramatic backdrop for...

This is a really interesting question! Holmes scholars, you may have a better idea here, but I'll give it a shot. Darwin lived from 1809-1882 and Arthur Conan Doyle lived from 1859-1930. Darwin...

The Valley of Fear is a novel that involves puzzles, murder, and Professor Moriarty. Holmes does not learn of Moriarty’s involvement until the end. He just knows that he gets a message written in...

Almost all of the Sherlock Holmes stories are told from the first person point of view with Dr. Watson as narrator. Dr. Watson is Holmes’s roommate, friend, and assistant. You can tell first...

Holmes figures out that Henry Baker has not committed a crime, even though he was the man who was carrying the goose that had the stolen jewel inside it. The way he proved this was by getting Baker...

On arriving at Stoke Moran, Holmes, determining which wing the family resides in, first examines all the windows from the outside and is able to determine where Miss Stoner used to sleep, as well...

Elias Openshaw, uncle to John Openshaw, is a stern, aloof, arrogant racist with a substantial amount of wealth. The character of Elias is given not in exact detail, but through implications of his...

The major similarity between these two stories is that both of them have to do with a man who has hidden his identity. In both cases, the men have assumed fake identities for the purpose of...

Sherlock Holmes is ranked #9 on the greatest literary characters of all-time list according to the book The Fictional 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Characters in World Literature and...

Arthur Conan Doyle tries to create the required suspense, and has been quite successful at that, in his short story How it Happened by writing the story as a first person account. The main...

Holmes claims, at least, that it shows that the man was an intellectual. He says this because the hat is big. (We know now that brain size does not equal intelligence, though.) The man was...

What Holmes does is he looks at something like the walking stick and tries to figure out as much as he can from it. For example, he figures out that the owner of the stick has a dog because there...

"The Red-Headed League" is a detective story, part of a series of stories focusing on the cases of Sherlock Holmes, the great fictional detective. As a writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is credited...

The tone of the story's narrator in "How It Happened" is factual and light-hearted, creating a jarring contrast with the mood of fear and foreboding that accompanies the nighttime setting and the...

A main disruptor of the Victorian domestic spaces in this novel is Tonga, the mysterious "other." As is eventually revealed, he is a native of the Andaman islands off India. In highly racist...

Mr. Jephro Rucastle wanted Miss Violet to do a few unusual things that would not be usually expected of a governess. Rucastle wanted her to be willing to wear any dress that his wife gave her to...

Hosmer Angel is actually a fictitious identity, taken on by Mr. Windibank, for the purpose of deceiving his stepdaughter, Mary Sutherland, as found in the Sherlock Holmes short story, "A Case of...