It has become quite the fashion for contemporary writers to have a go at reinventing past classics. We have seen it done with imperishable literary heroes like James Bond, Jeeves, Hercule Poirot, and Winnie-the-Pooh. While this is a relatively new phenomenon for many properties, it is not new in the case of Sherlock Holmes, who has inspired continuous adaptations, continuations, and reimaginings for well over a century. At any rate, the event went well, but the sequel did not.
The Birth of a Literary Legend
Sherlock Holmes was the original conception of Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish doctor down on his luck who had turned his hand to fiction to make up for a worrying lack of success in attracting patients to his surgery. Conan Doyle could never have guessed that the first Sherlock Holmes story he wrote, A Study in Scarlet, published in the 1887 issue of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, would in a few short years propel him and the characters he created to literary fame. Although he never set a story later than the eve of the first world war, he was to continue writing Sherlock Holmes adventures right up until 1927.
Expanding Beyond the Canon
The original Sherlock Holmes body of work written by Arthur Conan Doyle himself is called by Sherlockians “the Canon”—coincidentally and happily an anagram of Conan. The Canon comprises four full-length novels and five collections of short stories, amounting to 60 canonical stories in all. Since Conan Doyle’s death, the sheer volume of non-canonical pastiches and continuations has grown beyond count. The readership was worldwide and spread across all ages and classes. Black armbands were adopted, and a host of angry readers wrote abusive letters to Conan Doyle’s publishers, to the Strand magazine and to Conan Doyle himself, grown men and women wept openly. I don’t believe it is possible to count. Along with the great Golden Age mystery writer John Dickson Carr, wrote a collection of new stories under the title The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, conan Doyle’s son Adrian Conan Doyle. Which culminated in my landing in prison; I shan’t go into too much detail: Moab Is My Washpot, the first volume of my autobiography, is also happily still in print, and the full story can be read there, that expulsion led to other expulsions and disasters.
During Conan Doyle’s lifetime, stage productions (he collaborated on the first himself) and silent films were produced.
After his death in 1930, the great post-Conan Doyle Holmesian caravan began to rumble into full life. The Hollywood films starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson began in 1939 with the canonical The Hound of the Baskervilles, but soon began to move the pair into all kinds of modern settings. By the 1940s, they were doing their bit for the homeland by pitting themselves against the Nazis on screen. The personalities and characteristics of Holmes and Watson became as familiar to late Victorians as their own friends and families. Which soon became an established and legitimised part of the whole Sherlock Holmes enterprise, the Conan Doyle Estate was open to allowing and authorising such variations. Conan Doyle himself – frustrated by the burdensome discomfort of what he felt had become something of a millstone around his neck – killed off his creation by having Holmes apparently plummet to his death in Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls, pulling his arch-enemy Moriarty down with him into the roaring cataract. Well, I had noticed with excitement one day the parallels between Sherlock Holmes’s description of Professor James Moriarty (“He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head”) and TS Eliot’s description of Macavity the Mystery Cat (“his eyes are sunken in. His head is highly domed”), his brow is deeply lined with thought. It was hardly news, the society was being very kind in letting me address them on this topic: any fool could see that Eliot had based his Macavity entirely on Moriarty.
Stephen Fry’s Lifelong Obsession
Stephen Fry explains that he can say without the slightest fear of exaggeration that Sherlock Holmes altered and determined the whole course of his life. Fry had been entranced by the Sherlock Holmes stories from the earliest age, reading and rereading the entire corpus of stories avidly. Before long, he had joined, as their youngest member to date, the august Sherlock Holmes Society of London, an eccentrically aristocratic institution that boasted Lord Gore-Booth as its president. With Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson, and the pleasure of reading the entire Canon for Audible, i had the honour of playing Sherlock’s brother Mycroft in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
His obsession with the Great Detective famously caused a major childhood incident. While visiting London for a society function, Fry stayed in the city, sitting in cinemas from dawn till midnight and watching any number of films. By the time he came to and hopped on a train back to school, a full three days later than had been agreed and sanctioned, he found that he had been officially declared missing. His parents and the police were informed, and the hunt was on. However, those ructions finally got him thinking straight and set him on his eventual career path. Travel by train to London and attend a society meeting, at which I was scheduled to read a paper, i managed to get permission from my housemaster to leave school one weekend. My number finally up, the fat was truly in the fire. Anyway, all these ructions finally got me thinking straight and determining to change my ways and try for Cambridge, the university on which I had always set my heart.
The Tradition of The Game
- From as far as Japan and South America came letters addressed to 221B Baker Street begging for Holmes’s assistance in solving real-life mysteries.
- Some passionate fans even wrote to Buckingham Palace and Downing Street to urge the king and prime minister to award Sherlock Holmes a knighthood.
With the great rise in literacy from the middle of the 19th century onwards, a new kind of fiction arose to solve the puzzle of the lately arrived Big City—most especially London, the largest city in the world at the time. A strange breed of 20th-century heroes offered a similar promise of bringing light and order to the darkness and chaos of modernity, but without bothering to think much. In contrast, Holmes offered brilliant rational deduction. As Fry concludes, the world needed him in 1887 and the world needs him now.
