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EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Arthur Conan Doyle and Hugh Laurie

EVEN HAD HE NOT created one of the most famous and strangest detectives ever to solve a case Arthur Conan Doyle was a considerable individual. Born in 1859 he was a Victorian who came to personify the briskly forward-looking Edwardian. Educated at Stoneyhurst he then studied medicine at Edinburgh and practised for about eight years before concentrating on writing. Sherlock Holmes made his entrance in A Study in Scarlet (1887). Further stories and cases were to follow, mainly appearing in the Strand magazine. A collection, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, was published in 1892. Holmes quickly attracted a following and Conan Doyle balanced his hero’s eccentricity, elaborately explained deductions, rhetoric, the deerstalker hat, violin playing and cocaine habit with a solidly conventional sidekick, Dr Watson, a roommate of wondrous patience who never seemed to tire of hearing “elementary dear Watson”. The duo shared rooms in Baker Street, still something of a place of pilgrimage to devotees. Conan Doyle also wrote plays and other novels including The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896) which developed into a series. Politically and socially aware, Conan Doyle published non-fiction works on South Africa and the Great War. He was also drawn to miscarriages of justice and would inspire Julian Barnes’s most engaging narrative to date Arthur George (2005). Aside from revealing the passionate nature of Conan Doyle the novel explored his interest in spiritualism and séances.

Sherlock Holmes has spawned many examples of the cool detached genius paired with able, if less intellectually flamboyant, foils. Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse was teamed with Lewis, a good cop more dependent on common sense than imaginative intuition. The most intriguing variation of Holmes is Dr Gregory House, as played through eight seasons which ended in May, by Hugh Laurie. Laurie is the gifted British actor and all-round singer, jazz pianist, novelist, comedian, unlikely sex symbol and Renaissance man.

Exactly how Bertie Wooster, which Laurie played to his great friend and collaborator Stephen Fry’s laconic Jeeves, became the acidic virtuoso diagnostician whose leg injury has left him dependent on drugs, contemptuous of mankind yet attractive to most of the female characters, speaks volumes about the transforming powers of a script, never mind the allure of medical drama. In common with Holmes, House is a musician, has a drug habit and was shot by a man with the same name as Holmes’s nemesis Moriarty.

Most interesting of all, though, is that Holmes and House have only one real friend. In common with Holmes, House’s buddy is also a doctor, Wilson, cleverly played by the sympathetic Robert Sean Leonard, who visibly winces at House’s rude antics yet is always forgiving if bewildered.

Laurie won two Golden Globes for his performance and was nominated six times for an Emmy. The show at its best demonstrated how actors can volley sharp dialogue as if playing verbal tennis. Much was made by Americans of Laurie’s mastery of the accent.

Not bad for an Etonian son of a doctor father who had discreetly won a gold medal for rowing at the 1948 London Olympics.