Fictional English detective Sherlock Holmes was BOTD in 1854. The creation of writer Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes first appeared in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet. His grandmother was a sister of the French artist Vernet, and his elder brother Mycroft worked for the British civil service. Holmes is thought to have studied at Oxford or Cambridge University, and became a “consulting detective”. By his 50s, he was sharing rooms at 221B Baker Street in London with his assistant and companion Dr John Watson. Holmes’ uncanny powers of deduction helped him solve a number of high-profile crimes, making him a celebrity in Victorian London. During a battle with his nemesis, criminal mastermind James Moriarty, he faked his own death, returning some years later. Described as eccentric, introverted and dispassionate, he also had a queeny love of showmanship and regularly used morphine and cocaine (both legal drugs in 19th century England). A confirmed bachelor, Holmes had an aversion to women, other than the American opera singer Irene Adler (whose battle of wits with Holmes is recorded in A Scandal in Bohemia) and his elderly housekeeper Mrs Hudson. He has since become one of the most famous and frequently portrayed characters in Western literature, famously played by Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Jeremy Brett, Benedict Cumberbatch, Johnny Lee Miller, Robert Downey Jr, Ian McKellen and Henry Cavill. Fans and critics have speculated extensively about Holmes’ sexuality and the nature of his relationship with Watson. In Larry Townsend’s 1971 erotic novel The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Holmes is a muscular dom top who falls in love with and rigorously buggers the insatiable Watson. The queer shadings of Holmes’ personality are explored in the 1980s television serial The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes starring the closeted gay Brett; the 2010 series Sherlock in which Cumberbatch’s Holmes and Martin Freeman’s Watson are continually mistaken for a same-sex couple; and in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films starring Downey. In Conan Doyle’s 1917 story collection His Last Bow, Holmes is reported as retiring to the Sussex countryside. Mitch Cullin’s 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, which imagines an elderly dementia-ridden Holmes attempting to reconstruct his past, was filmed in 2015 by Bill Condon, starring McKellen as Holmes.