In February of 1905, Pierre Lafitte, a journalist who had previously founded two magazines, launched the magazine Je sais tout (“I know all”). It was around this time that the Holmes craze had made it to France. But by this time, demand for Holmesian content was tremendous, and since Doyle himself had all but refused to produce any more for seven years, other authors stepped in to capitalize on his success, most successfully, Arthur Morrison, who wrote stories for The Strand about a steely investigator named Martin Hewitt (and shared Conan Doyle’s illustrator, Sydney Paget). The following year, as notes David Drake, Conan Doyle revived Holmes, publishing a new string of stories in Collier’s beginning in September and in The Strand starting in October. Holmes had to be alive-for real, this time. But both publications were clear with their terms: retrospective stories were not welcome. The American magazine Collier’s Weekly offered him $25,000 for six brand-new Holmes stories and T he Strand offered to pay him £1 words for the same-the largest amounts offered to an author at that time. The demand for this was so great that publishers wanted more. By 1901, still regularly besieged with angry fan letters, Conan Doyle began to miss the income that Holmes provided, and so published the flashback novel The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901-1902, which was serialized in The Strand. At this point, Conan Doyle, who preferred to be known for his historical and scientific literature, had hoped never to write about Holmes again: he noted in 1896, “I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day.” But this wasn’t so easy.Īfter “The Final Problem,” in which Holmes meet his demise, twenty-thousand readers were so enraged that they cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand, which caused shareholders to pressure him to write more.
Still, Holmes’s immense popularity prevented him from doing so until December of 1893, when he had Holmes tumble off the side of the Reichenbach Falls while wrestling with his arch-nemesis Moriarty. But quickly bored of his character, he began planning to kill him off in November of that year. With queues of excited readers forming at newsstands on release dates, the stunned Conan Doyle agreed to write another six.
As scholar David Drake notes in a 2009 article on Lupin, though Holmes had been introduced in the 1887 novella A Study in Scarlet, he did not become a sensation until author Arthur Conan Doyle published six Holmes short stories in T he Strand Magazine from July to December 1891.
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