According to the Guinness book of World Records, the most-portrayed movie character is Sherlock Holmes. Considering his ubiquitous presence in modern media, it's hard to believe that only 4 original novels containing Sherlock Holmes exploits were ever published by Conan Doyle himself (though there were dozens of short stories). Perhaps some of this is due to the expired copyrights of the original works, which allows for anyone to write a derivative work royalty-free. In any case, virtually everyone has now heard of Sherlock, but likely have not heard so many details of the actual stories or their development. An interesting phase of the series of writings occurred in 1893, only 6 years after its initial creation. Struggling to make progress with his more serious work, Conan Doyle decided to kill off Holmes.