Sherlock Holmes: The most important fictional detective in the literature

Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character created in 1887 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is an English detective of the late nineteenth century, noted for his intelligence, his skillful use of observation and deductive reasoning to solve difficult cases. He stars in a series of four novels and fifty-six fictional stories, making up the "canon holmesiano" mostly published by The Strand Magazine.

Sherlock Holmes is the epitome of excellence brain researcher and influenced heavily on detective fiction after its appearance. Although we consider Auguste Dupin, created by Edgar Allan Poe, as a character very similar predecessor, one eccentric genius he did not reach the enormous popularity and author Holmes reached in his lifetime.

Sherlock Holmes was born on January 6, 1854. His father was an English landowner and his mother descended from a line of French painters. He has a brother, Mycroft, thanks to the prodigious powers to manage vast amounts of information held, works almost anonymously as general coordinator and internal affairs reporter from the British government.

Sherlock Holmes seems to have been a student in college, probably that of Oxford, Cambridge but definitely not. After graduation, staying near the British Museum to study the sciences necessary for the development of his later career. Meet Watson in 1881, at the Saint Bartholomew. Refuses knighted (Sir), but accepts the Legion of Honor.

His great enemy, also of extraordinary intellectual powers, is Professor Moriarty, who apparently came to end the life of eminent detective in the cascade of Reichenbach, Switzerland (The Adventure of the Final Problem). Doyle had to choose to resurrect his hero when thousands of readers protested wearing black ribbons on their hats as a sign of mourning. Sherlock Holmes returns in the case The Empty House (The return of Sherlock Holmes, 1903).

After a career of twenty years, of which seventeen Watson shared with him, Holmes retired to Sussex, where he focused on beekeeping, and even wrote a book entitled Manual of beekeeping, with some remarks on the separation of the queen, and, almost incidentally, solved one of their toughest cases: the Adventure of the lion's Mane (1907). Following his retirement as detective spent two years painstakingly preparing a major counterintelligence action shortly before the start of the First World War. Nothing about it has since 1914.

The extensive bibliography of Arthur Conan Doyle in which recounts the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and his partner Watson, known collectively as "canon holmesiano" consists of four novels and fifty-six stories collected in several volumes:
novels
-Study in Scarlet (1887)
-The Sign of Four (1890)
-The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902)                                          
  -The Valley of Fear (1914-1915)

Collections of short stories
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
-Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893)
-The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1903)
-His Last Bow on stage (1917)
-The archive of Sherlock Holmes (1927)