It has become quite the fashion for contemporary writers to have a go at reinventing past classics. We’ve seen it done with imperishable literary heroes like Bond, Jeeves, Poirot and Winnie-the-Pooh. This is a relatively new phenomenon.
But not in the case of Sherlock Holmes, where the practice is almost as old as the man himself. Sherlock Holmes was the 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 years propel him and the characters he created to literary fame.
The personalities and characteristics of Holmes and Watson became as familiar to late Victorians as their own friends and families. The readership was worldwide and spread across all ages and classes. 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.
The public outcry was swift and overwhelming. Grown men and women wept openly, 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. He grudgingly bowed to public pressure and unearthed a story set before Holmes’s plunge into the abyss – The Hound of the Baskervilles.
But only after the clamour still refused to subside did he at last bring his hero back to life in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, presaging a new stream of short stories and a full-length novel, The Valley of Fear. He was to continue writing Sherlock Holmes adventures right up until 1927, although he never set a story later than the eve of the first world war. During his lifetime, stage productions (he collaborated on the first himself) and silent films were produced, and after his death in 1930 the great post-Conan Doyle Holmesian caravan began to rumble into full life.
Now, you should know that the 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. In all, 60 canonical stories.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
