And it worked: Conan Doyle's Holmes tales raised The Strand's circulation and established it as the popular fiction magazine of its day.
#The adventures of sherlock holmes book citation mla series#
Sherlock Holmes is no exception.Ĭonan Doyle selected The Strand because it occurred to him that he could tie the success of this new magazine (which started in January 1891, six months before Conan Doyle started publishing his " Adventures of Sherlock Holmes") to his new series of short stories. And as any viewer of House, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Ugly Betty can tell you, having a character-focused genre series is a great strategy for commercial success. So Conan Doyle basically invented the episodic drama.
But if each story has its own self-contained plot arc, readers can get both the suspense and the resolution they want every month, while continuing to crave more Holmes-y goodness from one magazine issue to the next. After all, sustaining a reader's interest in one detective plot across multiple chapters is kind of hard, and if you miss one issue, you're sunk. Conan Doyle had the idea that this format would be perfect for a series of episodes from his detective's life. It was still pretty standard in the late nineteenth century for English novels to appear chapter by chapter in magazines before being collected into one published volume – that's how the first two Holmes novels appeared. Conan Doyle had some minor success with his first two Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet (1888) and The Sign of Four (1890), but it wasn't until Doyle started publishing Holmes-based short stories in a new fiction magazine, The Strand, that the character and his tales really started to take off. Holmes wasn't instantly popular by any means. (Though maybe you picture him as Robert Downey, Jr.) He's like Frankenstein or Dracula – one of those characters who becomes so fundamental to his genre that, even if you've never read a single Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story, you probably still know who Sherlock Holmes is. When you hear the word "detective," we're betting dollars to donuts that one of the first things that comes into your mind is the sharp-featured, pipe-smoking, deerstalker-hat-wearing Sherlock Holmes. Though Holmes may not be the first detective in fiction, but we kind of think he's the best.
Poe invented the classic formula: the super-smart private detective and his less smart (but more literary) narrator buddy, amazing leaps of logic that prove to be right, and a bumbling cop who can never quite seem to get it right. Auguste Dupin, hero of a bunch of stories by American author Edgar Allan Poe, as well as a very few others detectives, came before. Sherlock Holmes is not the first fictional detective.
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