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What makes a literary character great?

     Sherlock Holmes crops up on any number of lists of "all time favorite characters in literature".  I hope that after reading The Hound of the Baskervilles, you will understand why, although, interestingly enough, Holmes spends most of this novel offstage as it were.  We follow Doctor Watson to the Baskerville home, while Holmes remains behind in London, disappering from the novel for many chapters. 

A three-dimensional character

      Because of the combined 60 novels and short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle in which Holmes appears, we are able to piece together a biography for the detective that rivals in its details the life story of an actual person.  Check out for yourself a small piece of that life. 

A character who lives on

    Clearly there is enough of a fascination with Holmes that his character develops a life of his own outside of the Conan Doyle stories.  Among the facts you will learn by reading a record of that legacy:  Sherlock Holmes is the most filmed character in movie history (Number 2?  Count Dracula).