<P> After visiting Venice and Milan, he spent a few days in Paris observing Edmund Landolt, an expert on diseases of the eye . Within three months of his departure for Vienna, Doyle returned to London . He opened a small office and consulting room at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, or 2 Devonshire Place as it was then . A Westminster City Council commemorative plaque is over the front door . He had no patients according to his autobiography and his efforts as an ophthalmologist were a failure . </P> <P> Doyle struggled to find a publisher for his work . His first work featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, A Study in Scarlet, was taken by Ward Lock & Co on 20 November 1886, giving Doyle £ 25 (£ 2500 today) for all rights to the story . The piece appeared one year later in the Beeton's Christmas Annual and received good reviews in The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald . </P> <P> Holmes was partially modelled on his former university teacher Joseph Bell . In 1892, in a letter to Bell, Doyle wrote, "It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes...round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man," and, in his 1924 autobiography, he remarked, "It is no wonder that after the study of such a character (viz., Bell) I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal ." Robert Louis Stevenson was able, even in faraway Samoa, to recognise the strong similarity between Joseph Bell and Sherlock Holmes: "My compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes...can this be my old friend Joe Bell?" Other authors sometimes suggest additional influences--for instance, the famous Edgar Allan Poe character C. Auguste Dupin . Dr. (John) Watson owes his surname, but not any other obvious characteristic, to a Portsmouth medical colleague of Doyle's, Dr James Watson . </P> <P> A sequel to A Study in Scarlet was commissioned, and The Sign of the Four appeared in Lippincott's Magazine in February 1890, under agreement with the Ward Lock company . Doyle felt grievously exploited by Ward Lock as an author new to the publishing world and he left them . Short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes were published in the Strand Magazine . Doyle wrote the first five Holmes short stories from his office at 2 Upper Wimpole Street (then known as Devonshire Place), which is now marked by a memorial plaque . </P>

Who inspired arthur conan doyle to create his fictional character sherlock holmes