![]() “I hate him more than anyone! If I had not killed him, he certainly would have killed me. Here is Doyle ranting to his friend, Dracula creator Bram Stoker about Holmes: Moore captures Doyle’s elation at being free of the character that had outstripped him in every sense. The actual story appeared in The Strand (which published most of the Holmes stories) in 1893. Moore’s Doyle thread begins with Holmes’ demise at Reichenbach Falls. The mysteries alone are entertaining, but what Moore managed to pull off is the omnipresent ghost of Holmes – who hovers above Doyle and Stoker, the Sherlockians, and the reader. The second follows Arthur Conan Doyle and an incredibly charming Bram Stoker through the final days of Victorian London, on a tangled adventure that begins with a package bomb. The first begins at a modern Sherlockian conference at the Algonquin Hotel in New York when one of the members turns up strangled with a shoelace, and the hunt for his killer, and a missing volume of Doyle’s diary, ensues. Graham Moore poses the questions surrounding reader familiarity, iconic character, and authorial autonomy in his novel, The Sherlockian, out this month from Twelve.Īmong The Sherlockian’s many pleasures are not one, but two, traditional mysteries. Watson continue living and acting – albeit in Victorian England, which for them is alive and well. We know, in some corner of our mind, that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. There is that feeling of wanting more, wanting there to be another, undiscovered, manuscript. I view works linked to established characters with trepidation. How many parents would saddle their child with that recognizable a namesake? As a compulsive rereader of the stories, I ask myself: Why? What about Holmes draws us, more than 100 years on, not only to read the works, but also to love the character? How is it we know Sherlock Holmes? The name “Sherlock” seems all but retired like an old hockey jersey. ![]() Many mystery fans cut their teeth on Doyle’s stories. Numerous societies – including various iterations of The Baker Street Irregulars – have sprung up surrounding Holmes. We owe the community of Southsea our eternal thanks that Doyle’s medical practice was not more successful, leaving him time, as he sat waiting for patients, to try his hand at fiction. Nearly 60 stories and four novels comprise Doyle’s great body of work with the detective, and devotees of Holmes have existed since A Study in Scarlet first appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887. I’ve returned to few stories as often as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I reread for one simple reason: pleasure. ![]() And yet, I’ve returned to it many times, not just for the reading, but also to puzzle out how Christie pulls off her magic. How many times can the end of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd surprise you? Once. You will never have enough hours to read even a fraction of the worthy books that have been written, so why retread known ground? But I have made my peace with this limit of mortality, and even reread books I know will not change my life. Time’s constraint propels some into the reader camp. There are two kinds of readers: those who read, and those who reread. This essay was originally published on December 20, 2010. In today’s feature, Lee Thomas uses the occasion of the publication of Graham Moore’s The Sherlockian to muse on the problem of writing a character who outstrips his creator, and what makes us return to Doyle’s great detective again and again. Editor’s Note: For the first several months of 2022, we’ll be celebrating some of our favorite work from the last fourteen years in a series of “ From the Archives” posts.
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