THE CONAN DOYLE ESTATE - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Head of Legal
- Head of Legal Contact
Dr. John Watson is a surgeon in the British army while it is at war in Afghanistan in the late 1870s. He is severely wounded at the Battle of Maiwand by a bullet from an Afghan sniper's jezail gun and retreats with the army to Peshawar where he is hospitalised. Despite his best efforts he is unable to recover sufficiently to return to his post and the military have no choice but to grant him honourable discharge and he returns to England.
He lives in a private hotel for a while but soon needs to find more affordable accommodation. A mutual acquaintance introduces him to Sherlock Holmes, who is also looking for lodgings. So begins the relationship between Holmes and Watson, one of the first and most fascinating male "buddy" relationships in English literature.
Irene Adler only appears in one of Conan Doyle's Holmes stories - "A Scandal in Bohemia". She is an American opera singer. Once the secret lover of the King of Bohemia, she threatens to reveal their relationship to the royal father of his fiancée if he does not call off the marriage. Watson describes how "to Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name." He makes it clear that Holmes did not feel "any emotion akin to love for" her. But Holmes admires her cunning and admits that she is the only woman ever to have outsmarted him. He fails to recover the photo of herself with the King, the one she was using to blackmail him. But she leaves behind a photo just of herself. Holmes, offered a reward for his efforts by the King, says he just wants this photo of her.
Sherlock's number one nemesis and obsessive fan. Moriarty is the criminal mastermind who haunts Sherlock Holmes as the great detective hunts him during many of his investigative endeavours. Moriarty's impeccable intelligence and wit make him a perfect mirror of Holmes, often in an eerily romantic way. He seems to watch Holmes' every move, often right in front of his eyes, yet goes unnoticed.
No.1
"He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson" says Sherlock Holmes of Professor James Moriarty, the celebrated Binomial Theorem expert and author of "The Dynamics of an Asteroid".
The older brother of Sherlock Holmes by 7 years. Described by Conan Doyle in "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" as "Heavily built and massive; there was a suggestion of uncouth physical inertia in the figure, but above this unwieldy frame there was perched a head so masterful in its brow, so alert in its steel-grey, deep-set eyes, so firm in its lips, and so subtle in its play of expression, that after the first glance one forgot the gross body and remembered only the dominant mind."
Holmes himself says his brother has "the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living". Although an occasional problem-solver for Holmes, he is impractical and has little ambition or energy. He founded a Gentleman's club known as the Diogenes, where he spends most of his spare time, in a silent room alone with his thoughts. His greatest use to Holmes is the power and influence that he appears to have within the British government.