Sherlock Holmes Pastiches

Introduction

In December 1887, a seminal event in the history of English literature occurred: the publication of A Study in Scarlet. It introduced the most popular and imitated character that the world has ever seen—Sherlock Holmes. Its author, , went on to write a total of sixty Holmes tales—four novels and fifty-six short stories that came to be regarded as the Holmesian, or Sherlockian, canon. Those sixty tales define the character of Holmes and his friend, colleague, and chronicler, Dr. Watson, and define the methods and skills that have made Holmes stories, in all their various forms, among the most popular books in the world.

However, Doyle has not been the only author to chronicle Sherlock Holmes’s adventures. Thousands of stories featuring Holmes and Watson have been written by other authors, as writers throughout the world have attempted to put their own stamp on the saga. From England to America, Russia to Japan, and across the globe, writers have tried their hands at endowing Holmes with eternal life. As novelist once said, Holmes is a man “who never lived and so can never die.” His continuing existence is the realm of the pastiche.

The term pastiche encompasses the concepts of both parody and homage. Although Holmes has been subject to both, most pastiches fit the latter category. They are attempts to tell tales as Doyle would have told them with all the respect that he did. They run the gamut from short stories to novels to plays and films. Their characters include not only Holmes and Watson but historical figures, peripheral characters from the Holmesian canon itself, and invented characters who are given a new role in the Holmesian world. They exist in all countries, in all classes, and in all time.

Sherlock Holmes is a character who is so well known and so well portrayed by Doyle that other writers have no need to reinvent him or give him a personality. He is a known commodity whose keen powers of observation and attention to detail, determination to solve cases, and unmatched skill at deductive reasoning (though most logicians would call what he does inductive reasoning) define the man. Even readers not familiar with Doyle’s work are familiar with Holmes. He has become a cultural legend. A principal part of that legend is the antagonism between Holmes and his archenemy, Professor Moriarty. The professor’s pervasiveness in pastiches is somewhat surprising: Of the sixty canonical stories written by Doyle, Moriarty appears in only one.

General Stories

Many early pastiches can be consigned to the realm of parody. For example, an early series, written by R. C. Lehmann under the pseudonym of Cunnin Toil, recounts the adventures of a detective named Picklock Holes and his friend Potson. The first of these stories, “The Bishop’s Crime,” appeared in Punch in August 1893. Seven other stories followed. During that same year, Doyle and his friend James M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, wrote Jane Annie, a musical play that was produced in London. Unfortunately for the two of them, it was a colossal flop. Afterward, Barrie wrote a story titled “The Adventure of the Two Collaborators,” in which both he and Doyle are characters who consult Sherlock Holmes to find out the reason for their theatrical failure. Not liking the answer the detective finds for them, Doyle transforms Holmes into a puff of smoke.

Holmes has occasionally turned up in other strange settings. For example, John Kendrick Bangs’s Pursuit of the House Boat (1897), the second part of his trilogy about the dead, concerns a boat, which is home to the souls of such people as Socrates, Noah, Napoleon, and , that is taken by Captain Kidd from its moorings on the River Styx. The victims eventually hire Sherlock Holmes to help them; he ingeniously finds the boat and restores order to the world of the dead. One might wonder why Holmes was among the dead, but at the time of the novel’s publication, Holmes was believed by all to have met his demise at the foot of the Reichenbach Falls.

Other well-known authors have followed. wrote “The Stolen Cigar Case” in 1902, featuring the detective Hemlock Jones. Nine years later, wrote about “The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes.” Other names that have been used include Thinlock Bones, Sherlaw Kombs, and numerous other plays on “Sherlock Holmes.” What makes stories about such characters work is the fact that readers are already familiar with Sherlock Holmes and recognize him even when he appears under different names.

Even Doyle himself engaged in Holmesian pastiches. Two in particular stand out and are considered part of the Holmesian canon. “The Field Bazaar” was first seen in The Student, a University of Edinburgh publication in 1896. “How Watson Learned the Trick” appeared in 1922. Both stories are brief, and both are of a slightly whimsical nature, as though Doyle went out of his way to make fun of himself.

In 1941, the writing team known as Ellery Queen published The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, the first collection of pastiches brought into book form. Containing works of authors such as , , Bret Harte, and O. Henry, this volume was the definitive collection of pastiches for its time. Another seminal event in the world of Holmesian pastiches was the 1954 publication of The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, which was important for two reasons. The first reason was the stature of its two authors, and Adrian Conan Doyle. Carr was considered one of the best American mystery writers at that time, and Doyle was the son of Sir Arthur himself. The second reason was that the stories were very well-received. The presence of the younger Doyle as a Holmesian writer seemed to signal that anyone could write a new Sherlock Holmes story. Since that time, many writers have.

Of the numerous editors who have published collections of new Holmes stories since that time, perhaps the most prolific are the team of Martin H. Greenburg and Jon L. Lellenberg, who have edited at least seven collections of new Sherlock Holmes stories since 1987. These collections include Sherlock Holmes in Orbit (1997), The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1987), Murder in Baker Street: New Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2003), and two volumes of the Christmas-themed Holmes for the Holidays (1996). These collections have brought together some of the finest mystery writers of the modern era, including Loren Estleman, , , and L. B. Greenwood. They and many others have brought the great detective back to life in a style that pays homage to Doyle and furthers the legend of Sherlock Holmes.

Over the years, Holmesian pastiche writers have found a treasure trove of subject matter in the unchronicled cases mentioned in Doyle’s canonical tales. Examples include the singular adventure of the aluminum crutch, the story of James Phillimore who stepped back into his own house to get his umbrella and was never again seen, and “The Giant Rat of Sumatra.” These and many other adventures are mentioned only in passing within Doyle’s works. The Phillimore story has been the subject of at least two novels and nine short stories by other writers. The saga of the giant rat has been told in at least nine novels and seven short stories and has been at least mentioned in numerous other stories. One of the most bizarre of these adaptations was the “The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra” told by the players of the Firesign Theater in 1974.

“The Great Hiatus”

A gap in publication of the canonical Sherlock Holmes stories occurred between May, 1891, when Doyle appeared to kill off Holmes at Reichenbach Falls, and April 1894, when Holmes reappeared in “The Adventure of the Empty House.” This three-year stretch is known in Holmesian circles as “The Great Hiatus,” and many novels and stories have been written about the events in Holmes’s career that could have occurred during those years.

The American author Nicholas Meyer has written three Sherlock Holmes books. The most acclaimed, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), is set during the time of the Great Hiatus and tries to explain Holmes’s three-year disappearance. In this book, Dr. Watson, concerned about Holmes’s addiction to cocaine, takes his friend to Vienna in the hope that Dr. can cure his addiction. Under Freud’s psychoanalysis, Holmes discovers the reason for his obsession with Professor Moriarty. Meanwhile, Holmes prevents a war from breaking out. In The Canary Trainer (1993), Meyer provides another explanation of the Great Hiatus. This book has Holmes employed as a violin player by the Paris Opera and features Irene Adler as one of the opera’s stars. Meyer’s third Holmesian novel, The West End Horror (1976), involves murders in the theatrical district of London and has Holmes interact with such historical figures as and , the author of Dracula (1897).

The extent to which writers go to bring Holmes to life can never be underestimated. One of the most bizarre explanations of the Great Hiatus has to be one constructed by Bob Jones in Sherlock Holmes Saved Golf (1986). That book recounts how Sherlock Holmes, at the request of the Prince of Wales, foils a scheme to transform golf from the gentleman’s game that it was into something far less honorable that might compromise the integrity of some of England’s great families.

Historical and Literary Figures

Pastiches have pitted Holmes against three of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ most notorious real and literary figures, none of whom appears in Doyle’s canonical stories. The first of these is the real figure of perhaps the most famous serial killer of all time: Jack the Ripper, who haunted London’s East End for four months during late 1888, when he murdered at least five women. He was never arrested or even identified, and his identity remains a mystery. His reign of terror was brief, but it occurred during the heyday of Holmes’s career. Many people have argued that it is inconceivable that Scotland Yard would not have called upon the great detective to investigate the Ripper case.

Doyle himself never connected Holmes with the Ripper, but many pastiche artists have. Perhaps the most famous of these depictions is the 1965 film A Study in Terror, directed by James Hill, that finds Holmes tracking down the famous killer, who turns out to be Lord Carfax. A year after this film appeared, the Ellery Queen team, along with Paul W. Fairman, came out with a well-received novelization of the film. At least ten other writers have put Holmes and the Ripper in direct contact. Edward B. Hanna’s The Whitechapel Horrors (1993) is probably the best known.

Another major literary figure of the Victorian age is Bram Stoker’s Transylvanian vampire, Dracula, who comes to London and to take up residence at the Carfax estate in Stoker’s 1897 novel. Since that time, many readers have wondered how Holmes might cross paths with Dracula. Fred Saberhagen’s The Holmes-Dracula File (1978) postulates interesting familial connections between the two characters. Loren Estleman’s Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula (2003) dispenses with the family connections but adds more adventure.

Another literary figure who was known to have haunted London during the early twentieth century is Dr. Fu Manchu , whose evil exploits were first recounted by in 1912. He also finds his way into Holmes pastiches. His most famous appearance is in Cay Van Ash’s 1985 novel Ten Years Beyond Baker Street , in which the two characters match wits, as Holmes searches for Sir Denis Nayland Smith, the detective who was Fu Manchu’s principal nemesis in the Rohmer novels. Van Ash’s novel is not the only appearance of Fu Manchu in the noncanonical tales. Among the other authors who have matched Holmes against Fu Manchu is George Alec Effinger, who uses him in “The Musgrave Version,” a story told by Reginald Musgrave that appears in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit.

One of the most celebrated of the Holmesian pastichists is August Derleth , author of the adventures of detective Solar Pons and his partner, Dr. Parker. It is said that Derleth began composing his Pons series in 1928 after writing Doyle to see if more Holmesian tales would be published. When he learned that Doyle intended to write no more, he decided to publish his own. His Solar Pons stories are similar to Doyle’s Holmes stories both in style and substance. Indeed, the similarities are so strong that many Holmes readers think of Pons as Holmes’s nephew, although the exact familial connections are unclear. Nevertheless, Derleth knew his Holmes. Between 1945 and 1973, he published nine collections of Pons stories.

In 2024, acclaimed thriller author James Patterson took three of the most prominent literary figures from three of the most prominent authors—Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Edgar Allan Poe—and teamed them together in Holmes, Marple & Poe. Set in New York City, Patterson creates new characters based on the prominent literary figures who have created their own detective agency. However, their work attracts the attention of a New York Police Deparment (NYPD) investigator who becomes interested in who these three mystery solvers really are.

Peripheral Characters

Many Sherlock Holmes pastiches revolve not around Holmes himself, but around other characters created by Doyle, and even some simply created by circumstance. Three central characters in serial novels are Mycroft Holmes (Sherlock Holmes's brother), Irene Adler, and Mary Russell (Sherlock Holmes’s wife).

Many authors have used Mycroft Holmes, but he actually appears in only two canonical stories, “The Greek Interpreter” and “The Bruce-Partington Plans.” Doyle also briefly mentions him in “The Final Problem” and “The Adventure of the Empty House.” One of the most popular works to make Mycroft a central character is Enter the Lion, a 1979 novel by Michael Hodel and Sean Wright. This tale brings Mycroft and Holmes together in 1875, before Holmes meets Watson. Mycroft takes the lead here as he and Sherlock thwart a scheme to overthrow the American government and establish Confederate rule ten years after the American Civil War. A series of books by Quinn Fawcett has Mycroft defending the British government, its treaties, and its diplomatic relationships against a shadowy group known as the Brotherhood. These stories are narrated by Mycroft’s secretary, Pittman Guthrie, who acts as a Watson-like character and does the legwork in investigations, much as Archie Goodwin serves ’s Nero Wolfe.

Irene Adler has also become a seminal figure in the world of Holmesian pastiches. Along with Moriarty, she is probably the most recognizable of Doyle’s minor characters. Carole Nelson Douglas has written at least eight novels about Adler. Although Adler appears in only one canonical story—as an opera singer in “A Scandal in Bohemia”—Holmes’s chronicler, Watson, says that “to Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman.” Douglas has transformed this opera singer into a detective in her own right. Although Holmes appears regularly in Douglas’s Adler novels, his presence is peripheral to that of Adler herself. She solves the novels’ mysteries and presents as strong a presence as she does in her canonical appearance.

Laurie R. King has taken another direction altogether. Her 1994 novel The Beekeeper’s Apprentice introduces readers to Mary Russell, a young woman who meets and marries Holmes after his retirement to Sussex Downs. In such novels as A Monsterous Regiment of Women (1995) and The Game: A Mary Russell Novel (2004), an adventure initiated by Mycroft Holmes, King portrays a strong young woman who carries on the detecting tradition of her elderly husband. She has the greatest respect for her retired husband’s skills but also has the utmost confidence in her own abilities and solves cases in her own way.

Strange Tales

Science fiction is a genre that few readers would associate with Sherlock Holmes. Nevertheless, Holmes has found his way into that genre with some regularity. Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space (1985) is a collection of such stories. Edited by Isaac Asimov , Martin Henry Greenburg, and Charles Waugh, it features stories by Asimov and such other esteemed writers in the science fiction field, such as Poul Anderson and Philip José Farmer. Even the canonical story “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” makes its way into this collection. Sherlock Holmes in Orbit (1995), edited by Michael Resnick and Martin H. Greenburg, contains twenty-six stories depicting the detective not only in his own era, but in the deeper past, in the future, and around time itself. Ghosts in Baker Street (2006), edited by Martin H. Greenberg et al., contains thirteen stories by twelve authors who try to refute Holmes’s famous dictum, from “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” that “the world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”

Two strange science fiction adaptations of Holmes revolve around the concept of cryogenics. In the 1987 television film The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987), Holmes is said to have been frozen at the point of death and brought back to life during the late twentieth century by Jane Watson, a descendent of Dr. Watson. Holmes’s freezing and thawing out take place in England, but most of the adventure is set in the American Southwest, where Holmes learns to drive a car and adapt to a new culture.

Sherlock Holmes in the Twenty-second Century is a twenty-six-episode cartoon series produced by DiC and Scottish Television between 1999 and 2001. This series offers a futuristic look at the detective. In this series, Holmes has been frozen since his demise during the early twentieth century only to be revived two hundred years later, at a time when his detective skills are as much in demand as they were in his own time. Things have naturally changed, however. For example, Watson is now a robot; Inspector Lestrade is a lovely female detective; hansom carriages have been replaced by flying cars; and many stories are set on the Moon. However, although some things change, others remain the same, and the plots of these television stories are derived from Doyle’s original stories. Nevertheless, the pervasive presence of Moriarty in the episodes adds a definitely noncanonical aspect to what are, after all, merely pastiches.

Drama and Film

Theater and film have played a major role in the popularization of Sherlock Holmes and in the creation of images of him in the public mind. Moreover, it is likely that no character in the history of films has been portrayed as often as Sherlock Holmes. Hundreds of films have shown Holmes and Watson in a variety of locales, situations, and characterizations. However, the first screen presentation of Holmes was nothing more than a farce that used cinematic tricks popularized at the time by George Melius. Produced by the New York studios of the American Mutescope and Biograph Company around 1900 and featuring what would now be considered primitive appearances and disappearances, Sherlock Holmes Baffled was a sixty-one-second cinematic exploration of what the new film medium could do. Nonetheless, it demonstrates the pervasive presence of Holmes, as the brief film’s joke would make no sense to anyone unfamiliar with Sherlock Holmes.

During the early twentieth century, no actor portrayed Holmes more astutely than William Gillette, who wrote the play Sherlock Holmes and played the lead role for more than thirty-three years. First produced in 1899, Sherlock Holmes defined the living detective and is responsible for bringing the cult of Moriarty to life in subsequent pastiches. At the time the play opened, only twenty-five Holmes stories had been published, and only one of them had even mentioned Moriarty. Thanks to the prominent role assigned to Moriarty in Gillette’s play, Moriarty dominated Holmes pastiches. Gillette made Holmes his own. Perhaps his most famous addition to the lore of Holmes is the curved meerschaum pipe, which appears nowhere in Doyle’s stories.

Gillette’s play was filmed in 1916, with Gillette in the title role at the age of sixty-three. Sherlock Holmes films based on, or inspired by, Gillette’s play were later made numerous times and in various forms. In 1922, John Barrymore made his one and only appearance as Holmes in such a film; Clive Brook did the same in 1932. Even The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring Basil Rathbone in 1939, is said to be based on the Gillette play, although there are reasons to doubt that claim. There are no reasons, however, to doubt the version of Sherlock Holmes produced at the Willamette Theatre in 1981 and captured on film by HBO with Frank Langella playing the lead role. This production is closer to the spirit of the original play than were any of the previously filmed versions.

Many other Sherlock Holmes pastiches have been staged over the years. One of the most notable is The Crucifer of Blood, written by Paul Giovanni, which ran on Broadway from September, 1978, through April, 1979. The play is loosely based upon Doyle’s novel The Sign of the Four . One of this play’s many revivals was produced in 1980 in Los Angeles, with Charlton Heston as Holmes and Jeremy Brett as Watson. Heston also starred in the 1991 film version of the play, and Brett went on to star as Holmes in the Granada Films television series, which many critics call the most accurate screen portrayals of Holmes ever made.

Perhaps the most famous Sherlock Holmes films are those starring Basil Rathbone, whom many regard as the definitive Sherlock Holmes. Rathbone’s tall, thin profile, prominent nose, and distinguished English manner made him the image of the detective for a generation of Holmes fans. The same can be said for the portrayal of Dr. Watson by Nigel Bruce, despite the fact that his portrayal of Watson as a bumbler little resembles Doyle’s erudite doctor. Of the fourteen films that Rathbone and Nigel Bruce made between 1939 and 1946, however, few can accurately be called canonical, even though several—notably The Hound of the Baservilles and The Pearl of Death—present themselves as films based on Doyle stories.

Irene Adler and Professor Moriarty were united in Sherlock Holmes in New York (1976), in which Roger Moore plays Holmes, Patrick Macnee is Watson, John Houston is Moriarty, and Charlotte Rampling is Adler. The plot revolves around Adler’s son being kidnapped by Moriarty, knowing that he could lure Holmes to America to do all that he could to save “the woman.” In 1970, Billy Wilder directed The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, in which Holmes encounters not only Queen Victoria and his brother Mycroft but also the Loch Ness monster.

In 2015, another notable, high-profile British actor, Ian McKellen, starred as Sherlock Holmes in the film Mr. Holmes, directed by Bill Condon. The film, based on Mitch Cullen's novel A Slight Trick of the Mind (2005), shows an aging Holmes struggling with memory loss and attempting to recall the incidents that led to his retirement. The film was mostly well-received and grossed around $30 million.

Conclusion

The world of Holmes pastiches continues to grow. One place that feeds that growth is the Internet and the world of fan fiction. On numerous sites, people are encouraged to provide their own stories and their own perspectives on characters they have encountered in either their reading or their viewing. The Web site www.Sherlockian.net is a rich resource for all things regarding the detective and his creator. Almost everything in the Holmesian world can be found there.

Bibliography

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Baring-Gould, W. S. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective. New York: Random House, 1995.

Condon, Bill, director. Mr. Holmes. AI Films, 2015. Accessed 24 July 2024.

DeWaal, Ronald. The Universal Sherlock Holmes. Toronto: Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, 1994.

Fido, Martin. The World of Sherlock Holmes: The Facts and Fiction Behind the World’s Greatest Detective. Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Media, 1998.

Kaye, Marvin, ed. The Game Is Afoot. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Patterson, James, and Brian Sitts. Holmes, Marple & Poe. Little, Brown, 2024. Accessed 24 July 2024.

Ross, Thomas Wynne. Good Old Index: The Sherlock Holmes Handbook, a Guide to the Sherlock Holmes Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—Persons, Places, Themes, Summaries of All the Tales, with Commentary on the Style of the Author. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1997.