Elementary, dear reader

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on this day, July 7, in 1930. However, he left with the belief that the most important work of his life had been his support of spiritualism, religion, and his insights into his psychic investigations, which were based on the belief that the spirits of the dead continued to exist in the afterlife and could be contacted by the living. No mention of his work as the father of English detective fiction, not even a memoir that included Sherlock Holmes, his most illustrious character, nothing about his many highly successful books, not a single thought about the science or art of deduction.

Christened Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, he was the second of 10 children of Charles Altamont and Mary Foley Doyle. He was born in Scotland, United Kingdom, in 1859 and completed his early education with the Jesuits. He pursued further studies in Lancashire, an additional year of education in Austria, and when he returned to Edinburgh, he enrolled in university to study medicine. He is said to have turned out to be an excellent doctor and always acknowledged that, thanks to the skill of his professor, Dr. Joseph Bell, he was taught to observe even the smallest details of his patients' conditions, emphasizing diagnostic deduction. Thanks to this, he completed his bachelor's degree with honors, passed his master's degree in surgery, graduated as a doctor with the thesis "An Essay on the Vasomotor Changes in Tabes Dorsalis," and finally invented, as the protagonist of his first fiction novel, the famous detective Sherlock Holmes.

It was in 1887, when Doyle was in serious financial straits because his medical practice wasn't paying the bills, that he decided to take a manuscript he had written, purely for fun, to the publisher Ward, Lock & Co. It was titled "A Study in Scarlet." They decided to buy and publish it, and readers loved it. It was a novel and exciting work divided into two parts. The first, entitled "Reprint of the Memoirs of John H. Watson, M.D., Retired Officer of the Medical Corps," was narrated in the first person, in the voice of Dr. Watson himself.

The second part was called "The Land of the Saints," and it jumped in time and space to set it two decades back in Salt Lake City, the land of the Mormons. It seemed like a crazy and careless move, but in the final chapter, with unprecedented literary genius, it returned to the original story, where Sherlock solved the case and Dr. Watson became an indispensable narrative voice:

“Holmes was not a man of disorderly life; modest in his manner, regular in his habits, he rarely went to bed after ten at night; when I got up, he had already left the house after having had his breakfast. He spent the day between the chemical laboratory and the dissecting room, and sometimes took long walks, almost always on the outskirts of the town. It is impossible to form an idea of ​​his activity when he was in one of these periods of excitement. Some time would pass, the reaction would come, and then for whole days, from dawn to dusk, he would lie on a couch, motionless and without speaking.”

Everything changed. The novel was a resounding success, and for Conan Doyle, it marked the beginning of a fame he hadn't sought, one that would ultimately engulf him, leaving his lucid detective in the spotlight. Sherlock Holmes would become the most apt, celebrated, acclaimed, and renowned detective of all time, and Doyle, not only his literary father but also the "father of detective fiction." The works featuring Holmes were numerous and together they acquired the elegant and literary name of "The Holmesian Canon," a corpus of nine plays and 61 pieces, many of them published in the Strand Magazine. The last of these was published in 1927.

Overwhelmed and fed up with his character, Conan Doyle would later write a handful of spiritualist books that never gained recognition. Among them, "The New Revelation" and "The Vital Message," which would only provoke the bitter indifference of those who had previously been his fans.

It might be because, when it came to uncovering the truth of the events, the revelations of the dead and ghosts didn't achieve the same effect. Nothing like Holmes's words in the voice of Dr. Watson:

“Present a drop of water to any person with a modicum of logic, and he will be able to deduce from that single drop the existence of the ocean or the Niagara River, without ever having had the slightest idea of ​​either. The life of every individual is like a chain, in which it is enough to know only one of its links to deduce what all the others are like.”

Don't you think it's elementary, dear reader?