How Arthur Conan Doyle Plotted Against Sherlock Holmes

How Arthur Conan Doyle Plotted Against Sherlock Holmes

Larry Holzwarth - October 15, 2020

How Arthur Conan Doyle Plotted Against Sherlock Holmes
Holmes fans demanded more stories featuring the detective and Dr. Watson. Wikimedia

8. Once you have eliminated the impossible…

In several of Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes uttered some form of the observation, “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. In 1898, Doyle published in The Strand Magazine the short story, The Story of the Lost Special. The story describes the mysterious disappearance of a train and all of its passengers between stations. The mystery appears unsolvable. In the story, an anonymous letter is received by a newspaper, described as being from an “amateur of some celebrity”. The letter offers a proposed solution to the mystery and includes the quotation as the means of arriving at it.

Since then writers have used the quotation to link other characters to the fictional Sherlock Holmes. In the 1991 film Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country, Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock used the quote. He attributed it to someone he described as “an ancestor of mine”. Doyle’s use of the quote in a non-Holmes story five years after killing off his detective may have been an intentional tease of his fans; at the time he was working on a stage play which later received modifications from actor/writer William Gillette. The play, which enjoyed a highly successful run beginning in November 1899, included the first utterance of “Elementary, my dear Watson”, which never appears in the Holmes stories. Whether Doyle or Gillette wrote the phrase is unknown.

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