Sherlock Holmes His Last Bow Analysis

1305 Words6 Pages

A handful of further literary characters such as Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, were also clearly important predecessors to twentieth-century detective and espionage fiction. “According to Holmes, the “ideal detective” needs not only “the power of observation and that of deduction” but also “knowledge”. Though Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is more known as a author of detective fiction, some of his stories are in matter of fact early examples with the spy elements, e.g. The Naval Treaty, The Second Stain. In His Last Bow is the main protagonist Sherlock Holmes himself even as a double agent giving false data to the German army during the World War I. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer, poet, …show more content…

Around that time the glamorizing of a British spy went on, mostly in popular press, at the turn of the century the interest of the public was mostly put on Germany and Russia. It was also probably one of the reasons why in England, a variety of writers had used espionage as a main theme in their stories at the beginning of the twentieth century. Espionage put on imagination rather than actual life is connected with William Tufner Le Queux. Espionage in his eyes was glamorized. This author mainly wrote the genres of mystery, thriller and espionage, particularly in the years around World War I. “His Duckworth Drew´s adventures were precursors to later ones focused on new technology, such as an “electronic eye” – an Italian device that detonated mines.” “Apart from Le Queux, the novelist usually credited with shaping the spy genre is E.Phillips Oppenheim. His The Great Impersonation (1920) reveals the interesting theme about German aggression. This novel starts its plot with meeting of two old fellow students in East African bush, one German – Baron Leopold von Ragastein, one English Sir Everald Dominey, who had a striking resemblance to each other. One of them got an idea to impersonate each other because he was interested to gain an access to the higher society. Oppenheim´s novel The Great Impersonation was made and remade into successful movies several times. Oppenheim wanted to show the fall and failure of Germany in the world war. Another Oppenheim´s novel The Kingdom of the Blind (1916), is a story about the German sinking of the British ship the Lusitania in