His Last Bow [with Biographical Introduction]

"His Last Bow", published in September , is one of 56 short stories about Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was first published in Strand.
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The End of a Drama

He identified the security leak through which British secrets were reaching the Germans, and then set out to apprehend the receiving agents themselves. The housekeeper was one of Holmes' agents: Afterwards, Holmes retires from detective work. He spends his days beekeeping in the countryside and writing his definitive work on investigation.

In reference to the impending War, Holmes says, "There's an east wind coming, Watson. It is very warm. You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast.

But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared. The story is the last chronological instalment of the series. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes , set before the story, was published later. Asquith approaching Holmes to request he come out of retirement to investigate a man named Von Bork. He even founded a little magazine, The Stonyhurst Figaro.

However, the Jesuit education hardly suited him and when he left the school in , he completely rejected Christianity, and preferred to be agnostic.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:Biography

Nevertheless, he spent an additional year at a Jesuit college in Feldkirch, Austria, to improve his German. In , he began his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh. There he met two men who influenced the choice of his future novel heroes. Joseph Bell , Professor of Surgery, whose amazing deductions on his patients and their diseases did germinate the idea of a detective using the same methods. Alongside his studies, Arthur tried to earn some money to help his family. In , he worked as a medical assistant in Sheffield, Birmingham and Shropshire and doctor aboard a whaler, the Hope , in Greenland.

On 22 october , he graduated and enlisted as a doctor aboard a steamer the SS Mayumba to Western Africa. The voyage was unpleasant because of a storm and a fire on board, and Conan Doyle became seriously ill probably malaria in Lagos. He then decided to use his skills more peacefully.

After a brief and disastrous partnership in , with a colleague, Dr. George Turnavine Budd , he opened a practice of ophthalmology in Southsea, near Portsmouth. His clientele left him plenty of time to read, write and began to publish other short stories but without great success. In august , he married Louisa Hawkins "Touie" , the sister of one of his rare patients. She gave him two children Mary Louise and Kingsley and encouraged him to persevere in literature. He followed her advice because in he finished his first novel, The Firm of Girdlestone , but failed to find a publisher it will be serialized in in People magazine.

They published it in their Beeton's Christmas Annual in november and was totally unnoticed at the time. But the young author, disciple of Walter Scott, was already working on historical novels the kind he considered the only worthy of his vocation like Micah Clarke published in Having some success, he devoured the chroniclers of the Middle Ages as Froissart and Philippe Commynes. As a result, he wrote The White Company published in With this novel, which is a somewhat an idealized description of the English chivalry, Conan Doyle was proud to give England a second Ivanhoe.

In august , during a dinner hosted by J. The same year, the Conan Doyles stayed a few months in Vienna for Arthur to improve his medical knowledge. Patients were scarce again, Conan Doyle took up the pen again. In january , discovering the first issue of The Strand Magazine , he decided to write to the publisher and proposed new adventures of the detective as short stories, including A Scandal in Bohemia and The Red-Headed League.

He then provided five other short stories and renewed his contract for six additional stories at the rate of one per month [3]. The success was stunning.

His Last Bow (short story)

He abandoned medicine and devoted himself entirely to writing. Nevertheless, he wanted his name to remain associated with more literary works and in november he wrote to his mother: He prevents me from thinking to better things. Conan Doyle moved in december to Davos, Switzerland, where the air was healthier for his wife suffering from tuberculosis. Not far away are the Reichenbach Falls , a gorgeous, magnificent and terrifying framework for a dramatic end. After a series of twelve new adventures [5] , Holmes died there, resulted in a fall into the abyss with Professor Moriarty The Adventure of the Final Problem.

Despite fierce public outcry, and under his mother's pressure, Conan Doyle refused to resurrect his detective. A new life began.

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In , he gave a series of lectures in the United States and was received by Rudyard Kipling in Vermont. He also corresponded with Robert Louis Stevenson which told him he was telling the Sherlock Holmes stories to the Samoan natives. In Davos, he gives a demonstration of ski which he ha discovered in Norway during a previous trip [6].

Conan Doyle agreed, and when the actor asked permission to alter the Holmes persona, he replied, "You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him. The author's laconic comment to Gillette was: After a triumphant tour in the United States, the play opened in London at the Lyceum Theatre in the fall of The British critics panned it, but as it often happens, vox populi prevailed, and the play was a huge success.

When the Boer War started, Conan Doyle declared to his horrified family that he was going to volunteer. Having written about many battles without the opportunity to test his skills as a soldier, he felt this would be his last opportunity to do so. Not surprisingly, being somewhat overweight at the age of forty, he was deemed unfit to enlist. Without losing an instant, he volunteered as a medical doctor and sailed to Africa in February of There, instead of fighting bullets, Conan Doyle had to wage a fierce battle against microbes.

During the few months he spent in Africa, he saw more soldiers and medical staff die of typhoid fever, than of war wounds. The Great Boer War , a five hundred-page chronicle, published in October of , was a masterpiece of military scholarship. It was not only a report of the war, but also an astute and well-informed commentary about some of the organizational shortcomings of the British forces at the time.

Exhausted and disappointed, Conan Doyle opted for yet another change of direction when he returned to England. He threw himself head first into politics by running for a seat in Central Edinburgh, which he described as being the "premier Radical stronghold of Scotland. To his credit, he lost the election by only a narrow margin.

He then returned to London and continued writing.

His Last Bow - Wikipedia

The inspiration for his next novel came from a prolonged stay in the Devonshire moors, which included a visit to Dartmoor prison. At first, it was based mainly on local folklore about an inhospitable manor, an escaped convict and a huge black sepulchral hound. As the novel progressed, he came to realize that his story lacked a hero. He is quoted as having said, "Why should I invent such a character, when I already have him in the form of Sherlock Holmes.

1917 His Last Bow BBC Radio Dramas Staring Clive Merrison

Gossip has it, that the King was such an avid Sherlock Holmes fan, that he had put the author's name on his Honours List to encourage him to write new stories. Writing, looking after Louisa, seeing Jean Leckie as discreetly as possible, playing golf, driving fast cars, floating in the sky in hot air balloons, flying in early archaic and rather frightening airplanes, spending time on "muscle development," as body-building used to be called, kept Conan Doyle active but not really contented.

His lingering deep desire for public service made him go for a second attempt at politics in the spring of He lost the election once more. After Louisa died in his arms on the 4th of July , Conan Doyle slipped into a debilitating state of depression lasting many months. He extricated himself from his misery by trying to help someone in a worse condition than he was. Playing Sherlock Holmes, he got in touch with Scotland Yard to point out a case of miscarriage of justice.

It involved a young man called George Edalji who had been convicted of having slashed a number of horses and cows. Conan Doyle had observed that Edalji's eyesight was so poor that it was proof the convict couldn't possibly have done the awful deed. The Case of Oscar Slater , which he wrote in , gives a detailed summary of that affair. Finally, after nine years of clandestine courtship, Conan Doyle and Jean Leckie got married very publicly in front of guests, on September 18, With his two children with Louisa, they all moved to a new home called "Windlesham", in Sussex. He would spend the rest of his life living in that lovely house while keeping a small flat in London.

Arthur Conan Doyle was so happy to share many of his wife's activities that his literary output slowed down considerably after his marriage. Neither of them did well. That one closed after three months. To make-up for his considerable financial losses, Conan Doyle set out to write a fourth play, but this time with Sherlock Holmes. One of the difficulties of the production was the casting of the snake. The author insisted upon a live reptile, whereas the actors and the crew begged for an artificial one.


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Conan Doyle won, but later wrote admitting his mistake: After the success of The Speckled Band , Conan Doyle chose to retire from "stage work," "Not because it doesn't interest me, but because it interests me too much," he said. The birth of his two sons, Denis in and that of Adrian in , also contributed to keep the author from concentrating on fiction. A last child, their daughter Jean, was born in A couple of years went by before the author's next creation, the delightfully outrageous Professor Challenger, whose own wife called "a perfectly impossible person.

It involved the Professor in a delightfully humorous adventure, with a number of other highly personable characters, stranded in a mysterious region of South America, discovering prehistoric fauna and flora. This series stands out as a masterpiece of the genre authors have had no qualms to "borrow" from. But Conan Doyle's readers were not quite satisfied, for Sherlock Holmes was absent during a great part of the novel. In May , Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle sailed for New York, a city the author found unfavourably changed since his first visit twenty years earlier.

Canada, where they spent a short time, the couple found enchanting. They returned home a month later, probably because for a long time Conan Doyle had been convinced of a coming war with Germany. He had sent articles to newspapers about organizing "Military readiness," many years before World War I broke out. In he wrote to the Fortnightly Review, expressing his views about new untested warfare: He foresaw the possibility of a "Blockade" by enemy submersible ships, long before anyone in the British navy did.

The only solution he added would be to build a Channel Tunnel. But this intelligent man's warnings were judged to be "Jules Verne fantasies" by most naval experts. As soon as the war broke-out, Conan Doyle then fifty-five, offered to enlist again. He was denied his wish once more but set out to organize a civilian battalion of over a hundred volunteers.

When the navy lost more than a thousand lives in a single day, his brilliant mind never at rest, Conan Doyle made suggestions to the War Office to provide "inflatable rubber belts," and "inflatable life boats. Most government officials found him irritating at best. One of the exceptions was Winston Churchill, who wrote to thank him for his ideas. While writing a book, which was to be called The British Campaign in France and Flanders , the author was given permission to visit the British and French fronts in A while later, the Australian High Command invited him to observe their position on the river Somme.

Witnessing the Battle of St. Quentin made Conan Doyle say he would never be able to forget the horrors of the "tangle of mutilated horses, their necks rising and sinking," lying amidst the blood soaked remains of fallen soldiers. In late , the author made up for the lacklustre reception of his second Sherlock Holmes novel, with the publication of His Last Bow.