Sherlock Holmes is not the first fictional detective. C. Auguste Dupin, hero of a bunch of stories by American author Edgar Allan Poe, as well as a very few others detectives, came before. Poe invented the classic formula: the super-smart private detective and his less smart (but more literary) narrator buddy, amazing leaps of logic that prove to be right, and a bumbling cop who can never quite seem to get it right. So, props to Poe.
Though Holmes may not be the first detective in fiction, but we kind of think hes the best. When you hear the word "detective," were betting dollars to donuts that one of the first things that comes into your mind is the sharp-featured, pipe-smoking, deerstalker-hat-wearing Sherlock Holmes. Hes like Frankenstein or Dracula – one of those characters who becomes so fundamental to his genre that, even if youve never read a single Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story, you probably still know who Sherlock Holmes is. (Though maybe you picture him as Robert Downey, Jr.)
Holmes wasnt instantly popular by any means. Conan Doyle had some minor success with his first two Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet (1888) and The Sign of Four (1890), but it wasnt until Doyle started publishing Holmes-based short stories in a new fiction magazine, The Strand, that the character and his tales really started to take off.
It was still pretty standard in the late nineteenth century for English novels to appear chapter by chapter in magazines before being collected into one published volume – thats how the first two Holmes novels appeared. Conan Doyle had the idea that this format would be perfect for a series of episodes from his detectives life. After all, sustaining a readers interest in one detective plot across multiple chapters is kind of hard, and if you miss one issue, youre sunk. But if each story has its own self-contained plot arc, readers can get both the suspense and the resolution they want every month, while continuing to crave more Holmes-y goodness from one magazine issue to the next. So Conan Doyle basically invented the episodic drama. And as any viewer of House, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Ugly Betty can tell you, having a character-focused genre series is a great strategy for commercial success. Sherlock Holmes is no exception.
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