IN the opinion of competent literary circles, there are a few characters of fiction who step out of their books and become known almost universally. The literary eminence of their creators seems to bear no relation to their fame. The best known of them in Sherlock Homes who has been described as "the most famous man who never lived." Even without Holmes, Arther Conan Doyle would still hold a reasonably high place in the literature of adventure stories and historical romance. He himself wished to be remembered by his historical romances, notably 'The White Company’ and Sir Nigel', though these are ponderous compared to two volumes of Naploleonic short stories. The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard' and The Adventures of Gerard'. In Gerard he

created a really memorable and living character, a vain French brigadier, as brave as he himself boasts to be. though with an amusing touch of stupidity, who narrates his own exiting adventures in a delightfully flamboyant manner.

Doyel’s narrative, in fact, makes almost all his fiction eminently readable. Besides the Gerard stories. Doyle also produced an excellent volume of miscellaneous historical tales. The Last Galley, later issued with one additional story as Tales of Long Ago', which he considered the best of unaffiliated short stories. He was certainly a master of the short story of plot rather than character, but, apart from the Holmes and Gerard collections, he was probably at his best with Tales of Terror and Mystery' and of Twilight and the Unseen'.

In 1912. trying to escape from Ser-

lock Holmes, Doyle strove to create another memorable character as different from him as possible, and wrote The Lost World’. The story is of an expedition to a plateau in South America isolated from the rest of the world, where prehistoric animals and savages in a very early state of development still survive. It is told in a series of reports by the journalist member of the party — an excellent method of creating suspense — and remains one of the most popular of Doyle's books.

Doyle really lives as an important author by his long and short stories of Sherlock Holmes, the first private consulting detective, who made his rooms at 221B Baker Street, London so famous that large numbers of letters addressed to a fictitious character at a fictions address turned up long afterwards.

Doyle did not invent the detective story of the detective. There were detectives in the novels of Dickens and Wilkie Collins. The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet’ created little stir among critics or readers; the second of the longer adventures. The Sign of Four’ had more popular success. It was not until the Adventures' began appearing month by month in the Strand Magazine in 1891 that Sherlock Holmes took the public by storm.

Doyle's achievement lies in creating the first short detective story with the eccentric detective whose interest for the reader is focused on his mind rather than his soul, and who is accompanied by a companion who is a little more dull-witted than the reader is assumed to be. Doyle, the professional doctor with the scientific and analytic mind,

trained to observe and report found his perfect subjects in Holmes and Watson. He also captured the setting and atmosphere of the period and background in a way that created some unexplained spell. This produced the unique activities of Sherlock Holmes Societies all over the world and a library of Sherlock Holmes literature.

Probably most critics agree that The Hound of the Baskervilles' is Doyle's masterpiece. Many of his short stories. Including The Speckled Band’ and Silver Blaze' are in the same class. Although Doyle describes Holmes as "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen," he was able to create externally a character and a period setting as unique and recognisable as the more deeply drawn characters of the great novelists.

The Hound of the Baskervilles' remains among the most popular and memorable of the 56 stories and four novels Doyle based upon Holmes and his friend and biographer Dr Watson. In this novel presenting a structured sustained narrative that is difficult to achieve in detective fiction, we see Holmes and Watson locked into a brooding, even hostile Darwinian universe, an indifferent cosmos whose presence overshadows their lives and throws the world of Baker Street into its proper perspective. Doyle implies this cosmological perspective by establishing an historical framework with the story. This novel also shows that Doyle modified his traditional detective formula slightly to allow his hero to peer beyond the physical facts into the mystery of life itself.