Sherlock Holmes

Good morning everyone, and in advance thank you for listening. Today, I will tell you something about the greatest detective of all time: sherlock holmes. Before i start telling you everthing about him, i have a question for you: who has never heard of sherlock holmes? Like never.

Okay, so we can conclude he's a pretty famous guy. Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character, originally created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Before I'll go into sherlock himself, i will tell you something about this creator. After that, I will tell you about Sherlock himself, a consulting detective settled in London. The novels and adaptions of Sherlock will be the last subject I'm gonna talk about.

Now, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the original Sherlock Holmes book series. Doyle was born in eighteenhundredfiftynine, in Scotland, which is kind of surprising given the fact that his father was English and his mother was Irish. After studying medicine, which he could afford because his family was loaded, he started a medical career. During this career, and even during his study, Doyle already started writing short stories. His first published piece of writing was “The Mystery of Sassasa Valley”, a story set in South Africa. It was published in eitghteenhundredseventynine, printed in the Chambers Edinburgh Journal.

Even though after this he published a lot of short stories and medical articles, Doyle struggled to find a publisher for this first literature work: Sherlock Holmes. Finally, Ward Lock & Co took on the first story featuring Holmes and Watson: A Study In Scarlet. After this, a lot would follow. Though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is most famous for his Sherlock stories, he has written other novels.

The most known, after Sherlock, are the novels featuring Proffesor Challenger, another of Doyle's invented characters. I could go on for hours but in conclusion: he wrote a lot of novels and stories. To come to a sad end of my description of the author of Sherlock Holmes: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died of a heart attack at the age of seventyone.

Now on the actual subject of my presentation: Sherlock Holmes himself. To get an actual biografy of this consulting detective, we need to dig into the novels and stories of Doyle. Eventually these give away the fact that Sherlock is a sixty year old detective living in london on 221B baker street. After working as a detective on this adress for 23 years, he becomes roommates with doctor John Watson. They develop a close friendship when they work together on solving cases.

As for Sherlock's personality, he is... extraordinary. He's very closed and almost never shows any emotions. He's focused on his work and doesn't like any distractions. He is never very interested in women. The only time Sherlock actually was interested in them, is when he could use them to get information out of them for one of this cases. This asexuality suits the profile described before: a focused man who doesn't want to let emotions destract him.

In order to solve his cases, Holmes has a special method of detection: deduction. To make you understand how this is done, I'm gonna show you a video where Sherlock proves an man didn't kill himself, but is murdered. He deducts that the man is lefthanded and couldn't have shot himself because the wound is on the right side of his head.

Good, now that we know who Sherlock is, it's time to talk about the novels, stories, series and movies. Sherlock appeared in four novels and fiftysix short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The novels are called A Study In Scarlet, The Sign Of Four, The Hound of Baskerville and The Valley of Fear.

Apart from these longer stories, there are lots and lots of short stories. Where they were first published in magazines and such, they were eventually published in anthologies. For example, I've got a collection with me, translated into dutch. Of course there are many editions of the original books. This particular one is very old, but there are newer versions, for example this one.

If we dive into adaptions of the stories of Doyle, we drown in movies, series, comics, plays and even music and video games. There's a list on wikepedia that just goes on an on. Being the popular story it is, it's used for so many plot lines and movie scrips, it's impossible to talk about all of them. I think for our generation, the most known adaption of Sherlock Holmes is the BBC series Sherlock. The video I showed you is from that series. Starring in the series is Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock and Martin Freeman as John Watson. Personally, this is my favorite adaption, along with the Sherlock movie starring Robert Downey JR.

So, I've told you a lot about my subject, and before I end my presentation, I would also like to tell you why I chose this subject. I've been a fan of Sherlock ever since my grandfather told me stories about him, and later i read the newest versions of them and watches some movies and the BBC show. When I went to london last year I even visited the Sherlock musuem, which is at 221B baker street, well almost, and where you can visit Sherlock's house. Here's a picture of that, and with this, I would like to end my presentation.