The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes of the Speckled Band" as his overall favourite. Arthur Conan Doyle began writing while studying medicine at university in the late 1870s, and had his first short story, "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley", published in September 1879. After eight years, "A Study in Scarlet", Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes story, was published by Ward Lock & Co. The novel was well received, but Doyle was paid little for it, and despite a sequel novel, "The Sign of the Four", which was published in Lipincott's Monthly Magazine, he shifted his focus to short stories. In early 1891, the first editor of "The
Sherlock Holmes in popular literature, making him (as of 2017) the only fictional character thus honoured. The popularity of Sherlock Holmes has meant that many writers other than Arthur Conan Doyle have created tales of the detective in a wide variety of different media, with varying degrees of fidelity to the original characters, stories, and setting. According to "The Alternative Sherlock Holmes: Pastiches, Parodies, and Copies" by Peter Ridgway Watt and Joseph Green, the first known period pastiche dates from 1893. Titled "The Late Sherlock Holmes", it came from the pen of Conan Doyle's close friend, J. M. Barrie. A common pastiche