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Tuesday, May 22, 2012

May 22, 1859: It's Elementary, My Dear Reader

May 22, 1859: It's Elementary, My Dear Reader: Arthur Conan Doyle is born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He?ll go on to create the most famous detective in fiction: Sherlock Holmes.

Conan Doyle also popularized the archenemy dynamic in the form of evil Professor Moriarity — half of the key duality of every pulp novel and comic book ever written. And by killing off Holmes, with whom he had grown weary, Conan Doyle introduced the questionable literary device of resurrecting from the dead a popular character after fans roundly object to his untimely demise. It isn’t much of a slippery slide from Reichenbach Falls to Bobby Ewing’s death just being a bad dream, erasing an entire season of Dallas.