Arthur Conan Doyle(1859-1930)

The public furor over the death of Holmes in "The Final Problem" was tremendous, and "The Strand" magazine (in which the Holmes stories were published) was besieged by mobs demanding the return of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was tired of writing about Holmes, and wanted to get back to writing historical fiction. "The Strand" actually had to bribe Doyle with the equivalent of $1 million for each Sherlock Holmes short story. This was more than any writer had ever been paid up to that time.

Life is infinitely stranger than the mind of man can imagine." "Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult is it to bring it home.