Sherlock Holmes - Fanlore

Sherlock Holmes

Name: Sherlock Holmes
Abbreviation(s): SH, H/W
Creator: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930)
Date(s): 1887-1927
Medium: Literature; later plays, movies, and tv series as well
Country of Origin: UK
External Links: Sherlock Holmes on Wikipedia
Subpages for Sherlock Holmes:

Holmes/Watson


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Contents

The Canon

The 56 short stories and 4 novellas that comprise the Holmesian canon were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle between 1887 and 1927. During the past century they have been adapted into countless plays, films and TV shows.

The Fandom

At the time they were being written, the stories were immensely popular; Conan Doyle famously became tired of his other work being overshadowed by his detective stories and finally killed Holmes off in The Final Problem (1893), provoking an intense public outcry. Young men wore black mourning bands, and over twenty thousand people cancelled their subscriptions to Strand Magazine, in which the stories had previously been published. A decade later the author finally gave in and resurrected the detective for another three volumes' worth of adventures.

Conan Doyle generally wrote the Holmes stories quickly and with a minimal amount of editing, and as a result the canon contains a huge number of mistakes and inconsistancies; it was from these that the tradition of "Holmesian speculation" arose, which consists in pointing out the inconsistencies of the canon and devising (sometimes reasonable, sometimes extremely outlandish) explanations for them. The earliest recorded examples of this fannish activity are from 1902 [1], but the work that is considered to have really kicked off the fandom is Ronald Knox's 1911 essay, "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes," in which he satirized the German New Criticism of the Bible by applying those same methods of analysis to Conan Doyle's stories.

As Knox jokingly compared them to the Bible, the early fandom quickly took to referring to the collected works as the "Canon" or the "Sacred Writings" (in fact, Holmes fandom was the first to use the word Canon in its fannish sense).

In 1934 the largest Sherlock Holmes fan group, the Baker Street Irregulars (commonly known as the BSI), was founded by Christopher Morley. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, Rex Stout, Isaac Asimov and Neil Gaiman have been numbered among its members. [2]. The Sherlock Holmes Society was also founded in 1934, although it was disbanded in 1937 and reformed in 1952.

These organizations dedicated themselves to the practice of "The Great Game," a form of fannish speculation in which it is assumed that the stories are all accounts of true events written by Dr. Watson, and that Conan Doyle was merely Watson's "literary agent," who got them published.

In 1941, Rex Stout first proposed his infamous "Watson Was a Woman" theory, in which he pointed to numerous instances of what, today, would probably be considered slashy subtext in order to conclude that Watson was really female and that she and Holmes were married. The Baker Street Irregulars were not amused, although Stout's essay was very obviously tongue-in-cheek. This is notable as an early fannish discussion of genderswap (and, indeed, female!Watson is a not uncommon device in modern fanfic).

In 1947, Jay Finley Christ devised the system of abbreviation that is still in use in the modern fandom: each canon story is represented by the first four letters of the first "significant" word in the title: so "A Scandal in Bohemia" is SCAN, "The Adventure of the Empty House" is EMPT, and so forth.

Sherlock fandom has also given fandom in general the terms Watsonian vs. Doylist, as labels for different ways to interpret a source text.

Holmes/Watson slash fan fiction has become much more popular in recent years (need somebody who know much more about this to write details!).

Fanart

Fanfiction links

Fanzines and Journals

A list of fanzines is kept here (last updated in 2002)

Gen:

Gen multimedia:

Adult:

Slash:

Slash, multimedia:

Newsletters, non-ficiton:

Filk:

Vids

Fannish Resources Online

Published Derivative Works

Sherlock Holmes fandom is interesting in that many well-respected authors have written and published what could arguably be defined as Sherlock Holmes fanfiction. For over a century these works have been published both in Sherlockian journals (the fandom's equivalent of fanzines), and as novels; according to some accounts, they make up more than half of all English-language literary pastiches.[3]

For example, Dorothy Sayers, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, once wrote a crossover in which an eight-year-old Peter Wimsey enlisted the help of Sherlock Holmes to find a lost kitten. [4] Some of these derivative works, like Shadows Over Baker Street are approved by the Holmes estate, while others are not.

A note on terminology: In Holmes fandom, the words pastiche and fanfic are often used interchangeably, but they do have somewhat different connotations. Within the fanfic community, pastiche more often refers to works that have appeared in print in some form, with fanfic being reserved for Internet fare -- in particular, for works whose creators actually consider themselves part of the wider fanfic community (as many Holmesian pastiche authors do not).

Further examples include:

  • Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! edited by Michael Reaves and John Pelan, an anthology of crossovers with the Cthulhu Mythos. (Contains A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman, which won a Hugo award for Best Short Story.)
  • The Adventure of the Laughing Jarvey, by Stephen Fry
  • The Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King
  • The Doctor's Case, by Stephen King
  • The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
  • The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer, in which Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud
  • The Last Sherlock Holmes Story by Michael Dibdin, about Sherlock Holmes' involvement in the Jack the Ripper murders.

Many of these derivative works have spawned their own sub-fandoms, where fanfic writers write their own fanfiction based on the variant universes created by Laurie R. King or Neil Gaiman.

Crossovers are a well-established tradition in the fandom; Holmes has apocryphally encountered almost any real person or fictional character of the late nineteenth century one might care to name -- the most frequent possibly being Dracula and Jack the Ripper.

Further non-canonical works derived from the Holmes mythos are listed on Wikipedia. [5]

Despite the huge numbers of Holmes fans all around the world, the fandom's online presence is surprisingly small; small enough, at least, that it has been one of the approved fandoms for the annual Yuletide rare fandoms fic exchange.

Connection to 'House, M.D.' Fandom

The character of Dr. Gregory House who solves medical mysteries in the TV show House, M.D., is a conscious echo of, or homage to, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. His friend Dr. James Wilson bears some resemblances to Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories.[6]

References

  1. ↑ The Straight Dope, Did Sherlock Holmes really exist? (accessed April 22, 2009)
  2. ↑ Wikipedia, Baker Street Irregulars (accessed April 22, 2009)
  3. ↑ Neverending Stories: Professional Fan Fiction (accessed April 22, 2009)
  4. ↑ Mayhap, DLS does crack; or, The Young Lord Peter Consults Sherlock Holmes
  5. ↑ Wikipedia, Non-canonical works related and derived from Sherlock Holmes
  6. ↑ http://www.housemd-guide.com/holmesian.php How Dr. Gregory House is Like Sherlock Holmes, accessed October 25, 2008
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