Sherlock's darkness is his genius

In the East End of London, 1888, a serial killer was on the loose. A series of slayings of women in Whitechapel had become associated in people’s minds with an imagined single murderer known as “Jack the Ripper”. Journalists were delighted to write about a new kind of criminal: mysterious, motiveless, all-powerful. And readers were equally ready for a new type of detective, with powers of his own to equal the “Ripper’s”. The stage was set for Sherlock Holmes.
He made his first appearance in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story A Study in Scarlet, published in a Christmas album in 1887. It was re-issued in novel form in the year of the Whitechapel murders, 1888.
Holmes is, of course, still alive and well today, and returns to BBC One on New Year's Day in his latest incarnation, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the detective alongside Martin Freeman as Dr Watson, a fantastically clever reworking of one of fiction’s greatest characters.
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