American Detective: The Man Arthur Conan Doyle Called 'America's Sherlock Holmes'

Benjamin Welton at the Atlantic offers an interesting piece on an American detective.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous characters, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, are almost undoubtedly the most enduring figures in the history of detective fiction. Even though the original book series first surfaced in 1887, popular TV shows on both sides of the Atlantic (BBC’s Sherlock and CBS’s Elementary) are doing much to rekindle an interest in Doyle’s mystery-solving duo, while other mediums—from the Guy Ritchie films starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law to the Ian Edginton and Davide Fabbri comic series Victorian Undead (which pits Holmes and Dr. Watson against a whole bevy of supernatural creatures)—are doing their part to insure that the Great Detective and his Boswell can be found in every nook and cranny of popular culture.

Despite the fact that Holmes and Dr. Watson are fictional characters, though, their cultural influence can even be discerned in the history of the world outside of the printed page. Ever since the end of the Victorian age, real detectives and police officials have often been held to the standards of fiction and have even seen their exploits re-cast as updated versions of one of Doyle’s many gaslight era tales. One American law-enforcement figure, in particular, bore the burden of living up to Holmes’s legacy: William J. Burns, an Irish-American sleuth who bore more than a passing resemblance to Doyle himself.

According to William R. Hunt’s biography Front-Page Detective: William J. Burns and the Detective Profession, 1880-1930, Burns was a friend of both President Theodore Roosevelt and Doyle—the latter of whom publicly hailed Burns as “America’s Sherlock Holmes."

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http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/the-man-arthur-conan-doyle-called-americas-sherlock-holmes/281618/