One of the four novels
within the sixty episodes of the Sherlock Holmes canon, A Study in
Scarlet(1877) marked the debut of Holmes and his assistant, Dr. Watson, along
with their residence at 221 B Baker Street, Inspector Lestrade, and the ragtag
band of street urchins Holmes referred to as "the Baker Street
Irregulars." Doyle modeled Holmes in part upon the idiosyncrasies of one
of his medical school instructors, Dr. Joseph Bell; the literary structure,
however, he borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe's stories of Auguste Dupin. The
brilliant but eccentric detective, the admiring friend who narrates the story,
the cases which are puzzling and fantastic as much as sensationally criminal,
the dramatically revealed solution at the end; all these are elaborated from
Poe's work.