Conclusion
Sherlock Holmes is one of the most influential detective characters ever created in the crime fiction genre. Originally created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the character has lasted much longer than the creator and seen many different adaptations. The impressive detective put together incredible observational skills and deductive abilities along with his strong and athletic physical ability in order to create a sensational detective that has captured the mind of audiences for over 100 years. The detectives cases dealt with murder and sensational crimes that were considered to be potentially inappropriate for audiences of the time he was created in. Victorian era literature showed many fears of the society within its writing and Sherlock Holmes is not an exception. As seen in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” the fear of foreign influences is portrayed throughout the story and the very premise of Sherlock Holmes’ need to be a detective went against the respectability that society expected, showing domestic crimes of adultery, violence, and status that captivated the minds of readers for a century past the time period.
The character’s popularity outshined the rest of the more serious literature that Conan Doyle created and caused the author to become annoyed with his fanbases love of the character. This caused Doyle to kill off the character and after 8 years and many different pressures, the author went back to creating stories of the fan favorite. However, as we discuss Sherlock Holmes and his relationship to Doyle it is hard not to imagine the affect the author’s dislike of the character had on his short stories. As we saw in the comparative analysis, it seems that in Doyle’s stories after resurrecting Holmes were much different structurally than his earlier work and even the story where he killed off the character. “The Adventure of Mazarin Stone” featured a case that was written as a far shorter story with sentence length that was half of the size of his previous work and simpler complexity. Overall, it is necessary to analyze the average word count, sentence length, and sentence complexity of all of 62 cases, and compare the difference of the 3 elements before and after the death of Holmes. While Mazarin Stone is only 1 of the 34 cases that was written after resurrection of the character, it shows evidence that this conversation is one worth having.