Elementary Holmes

Sherlockian scholarship assumes that the Baker Street detective and his companion Dr. Watson were real people, not products of Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagination, and that any inconsistencies in the four novels and fifty-six stories published between 1887 and 1927 were not merely the product of Doyle’s haste and fallible memory.

Oxford undergraduate Ronald A. Knox started it all in 1912 with his satirical “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” following the trend in criticism “by which we treat as significant what the author did not mean to be significant, by which we single out as essential what the author regarded as incidental.”

Others approached the game in the same playful spirit: Anthony Boucher contended that the Holmes who returned after his supposed death at Reichenbach Falls was an impostor; Christopher Morley thought Holmes might have been an American; and in the most notorious and broadly comic example, Rex Stout asserted that “Watson Was a Woman.”

Great fun, but as these efforts became more esoteric, and it became less certain their authors were kidding, casual readers dropped away. In his 1935 essay “Sherlock the God,” G.K. Chesterton observed, “It is getting beyond a joke. The hobby is hardening into a delusion.” (That essay plus several others by and about Father Brown’s creator are included in the small but substantial “G.K. Chesterton’s Sherlock Holmes,” centered on his unfinished illustrations for a never-realized 1930s edition of the Holmes stories.)

Pastiches–new adventures written in serious imitation of the originals–have much broader appeal. The best early example was Vincent Starrett’s “The Adventure of the Unique Hamlet” (1920). Later, “The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted,” published under the Doyle name in a 1948 issue of Cosmopolitan as a newly discovered Holmes story, was subsequently proven to be a pastiche written by architect Arthur Whitaker.

For many years, the protective Doyle estate discouraged pastiche writing, finding a way to suppress Ellery Queen’s 1944 anthology “The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes” and authorizing only “The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes” (1954), a collaboration of Conan Doyle’s son Adrian and John Dickson Carr. The earliest novel-length pastiches, H.F. Heard’s “A Taste for Honey” (1941) and its sequels, hid a retired Sherlock behind an alias, Mr. Mycroft, borrowed from the smarter but lazier Holmes brother.

Nicholas Meyer’s “The Seven Percent Solution” (1974) began the still-surging flood of novel-length pastiches. Meyer pioneered the now common practice of inserting real-life contemporaries, including Sigmund Freud and (in the 1976 “The West End Horror”) Bernard Shaw, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Oscar Wilde.

Others would involve Holmes in true crime cases, most frequently Jack the Ripper but also the Dreyfus case, in Michael Hardwick’s excellent “Prisoner of the Devil” (1980), and even the Kennedy assassination in Edmund Aubrey’s fanciful “Sherlock Holmes in Dallas” (1980). Holmes also entered other fictional worlds, as in Loren Estleman’s “Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula; or The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count” (1978) and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes” (1979).

Those writing an extended series of pastiches frequently adopt a trademark slant. In a couple of admirably executed if unlikely variants, Larry Millett brings Holmes and Watson to Minnesota for several cases, while Laurie R. King gives the older Holmes a new Watson in the unexpected person of a wife. Some of the best pastiches, such as those of L.B. Greenwood, shun all of these gimmicks in favor of wholly fictional cases in Watson’s familiar voice and milieu.

While some writers ill-advisedly put Holmes and Watson in the overstuffed novels favored in the current market, others have continued in the shorter length Doyle favored, notably June Thomson and Donald Thomas. Others have appeared in five original anthologies from book-packager Martin H. Greenberg, including pastiches from authors as varied as Anne Perry, Bill Crider, Carolyn Wheat, Edward D. Hoch, Peter Lovesey, Dorothy B. Hughes, Stephen King (and my own contributions to the genre). The most recent is “Murder, My Dear Watson” (2002), edited by Greenberg, Jon Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower.

In gathering stories for “My Sherlock Holmes,” editor Michael Kurland laid down this rule: While Holmes must appear, the viewpoint character is not Watson but some other figure from the canon. Thus, stories are narrated by secondary characters from Mrs. Hudson to Billy the page. In Richard Lupoff’s opening story, one of the collection’s strongest, Edgar Allan Poe’s Parisian sleuth Dupin not only responds to Holmes’s slighting remarks about him in “A Study in Scarlet” but recounts an adventure they shared. Two of the stories are from established series: Kurland’s about Professor Moriarty and Michael Mallory’s about Amelia (the second Mrs.) Watson. Some of the others appear intended to herald sequels.

It’s inevitably a mixed bag, but pleasurable on balance. Mel Gilden presents a reasonable solution to the mystery of James Phillimore, “who, stepping back into his house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world,” and also addresses the obvious charge that Phillimore’s illusion could never have fooled Holmes. Linda Robertson’s story takes the form of a women’s magazine interview with Mrs. Hudson, in which startling revelations about the Baker Street landlady give the sheltered interviewer more than she bargained for. Peter Tremayne, whose novels and stories about seventh-century Irish sleuth Sister Fidelma are gems of historical detection, wins the prize for scholarship, filling his clever tale of Colonel Sebastian Moran with arcane facts and sending the reader to a specialized dictionary for the final revelation. The late George Alec Effinger describes, through the eyes of Reginald Musgrave, Holmes’s encounter with Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu. The final piece, by C.D. Ewing, presents a comic profile of Holmes, ostensibly from a 1907 issue of Hogbine’s Illustrated Monthly, including irreverent views from Scotland Yard’s Lestrade, Watson literary agent Doyle, and others.

Inappropriate period language is a frequent pitfall. Norman Schreiber’s story, told by Wiggins of the Baker Street Irregulars and involving an encounter with Lewis Carroll, puts a grammatical atrocity into Holmes’s mouth: “[Y]our little foray into matchmaking pleased Reverend Dodgson and I no end.” Gary Lovisi’s Mycroft Holmes narrative includes such anachronistic terms as upbeat, scenario, nonevent, and freelance as a verb. Even the highly literate editor comes up with the bizarre infinitive “to trod.”

These lapses won’t bother some readers. August Derleth, the prolific Wisconsin author who wrote about Holmes surrogate Solar Pons from the late 1920s until his death in 1971, often allowed Americanisms and other solecisms to creep into his stories, but when a “corrected edition” was posthumously published, fans objected. For many lovers of Holmes, even those pastiches that are not, objectively speaking, very good are made pleasurable by the shared enthusiasm of their authors.

A frequent contributor of essays on mystery fiction to The Weekly Standard, Jon L. Breen is the winner of two Edgar awards.