Harriet Sherwood in The Guardian:
Arthur Conan Doyle secretly hated his creation Sherlock Holmes and blamed the cerebral detective character for denying him recognition as the author of highbrow historical fiction, according to the historian Lucy Worsley.
Doyle was catapulted from “obscurity to worldwide fame” after his crime stories began appearing in a magazine in 1891, Worsley writes in the Radio Times. Eleven years later he was awarded a knighthood. Yet “beneath the surface he was a discontented man”, according to Worsley. Conan Doyle struggled to find a publisher for his Sherlock stories after initially approaching the intellectual Cornhill magazine. “Only after they, and two others, rejected Mr Holmes, was he finally accepted by a fourth, much trashier, publisher. They said the work was exactly what they were looking for: ‘cheap fiction’.”
More here.