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1887，福尔摩斯初次登场

Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories that feature Holmes. The first two stories, short novels,appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887 and Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890, respectively.The character grew tremendously in popularity with the beginning of the first series of short stories in The Strand Magazine in 1891; further series of short stories and two serialised novels appeared until 1927. The stories cover a period from around 1875 up to 1907, with a final case in 1914.

All but four stories are narrated by Holmes's friend and biographer, Dr John H. Watson; two are narrated by Sherlock Holmes himself, and two others are written in the third person. In two stories ("The Musgrave Ritual”and“The Gloria Scott") Holmes tells Watson the main story from his memories, whereas Watson becomes the narrator of the frame story.

Conan Doyle said that the character of Holmes was inspired by Dr Joseph Bell, for whom Doyle had worked as a clerk at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Like Sherlock Holmes, Bell was noted for drawing large conclusions from the smallest observations.Michael Harrison has argued in a 1971 article in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine that the character was inspired by Wendell Scherer a "consulting detective" in a murder case that allegedly received a great deal of newspaper attention in England in 1882.

Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who

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first appeared in publication in 1887. He is the creation of Scottish-born author and physician Arthur Conan Doyle. A brilliant London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his intellectual prowess, and is renowned for his skillful use of astute observation, deductive reasoning and inference to solve difficult cases.

Holmes describes himself as "Bohemian" in habits and lifestyle. According to Dr Watson, Holmes is an eccentric, with no regard for contemporary standards of tidiness or good order. In an early story, Watson describes Holmes as:

"The worst tenant in London...（he）keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece... He had a horror of destroying documents…Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner."
 
In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes claims he does not know that the Earth revolves around the sun, as such information is irrelevant to his work solving crimes. Directly after having heard that fact from Watson, he says he will immediately try to forget i