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I might end up having an unfortunate encounter with the Giant Rat of Sumatra). The Game treats Holmes and Watson as real people, the events of the stories as true, and Doyle as Watson’s literary executor (please don’t inform the Sherlockians that I suggested otherwise. People took it seriously, and it soon became the founding text of Sherlockian scholarship, and of the Game. Though his elaborate scholarship and overwhelming attention to detail was intended as a parody of academic study, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” took on a life of its own. Deriving its name from Holmes’ famous exclamation, “the game is on!”, whenever he encountered an exciting case, it is an endeavor that began somewhere around 1928, when the venerable scholar Ronald Knox published an article demonstrating that the serious academic attention given to the Bible could be equally well applied to the Sherlock Holmes stories. Thus were born the Baker Street Irregulars and what we know today as the Great Game. The boundaries of reality and fiction had already been crossed, and they needed to be crossed even more. Soon, however, more stories were simply not enough. Doyle had inadvertently created a world people wanted to inhabit, and he was a lot less interested in living there than his readers. It did take him ten years to do so, though, which makes the Sherlock hiatus look not quite as bad.īut, though Doyle did eventually resuscitate Holmes and seemingly come to terms with his popularity, the detective was never his favorite literary creation. Eventually, Doyle brought Holmes back from the dead, though whether he did this in response to fan enthusiasm or simply because he wanted the money is up for debate. Though Doyle had little fondness for his greatest literary creation, the public disagreed adamantly. Accusations of murder flew through the air. Even more piles of pleas and petitions arrived on Doyle’s doorstep. People cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand (the newspaper that then published the Holmes stories), but not before sending piles of angry letters. Black armbands were worn to commemorate the great detective’s passing. When Doyle had the extremely unfortunate idea to push Sherlock Holmes off the edge of Reichenbach Falls and be rid of him for good, he was little prepared for the reaction that followed. So real was Holmes, in fact, that his “death” was perceived as that of a real person.
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There’s a lot of explanations particular to the time period that could answer for that: the spread of print media, the rise of celebrity culture, and the realistic style of the stories provided the fuel that allowed people to believe Holmes was real, or to wilfully suspend their disbelief. Letters were written to 221b Baker Street (which was a problem, since Baker Street numbers didn’t go up that high at the time).Īnd, while most people likely understood that Holmes was fictional and wrote such things tongue in cheek, some quite literally believed Holmes was real. They asked for copies of the stories to be signed by “Sherlock Holmes.” Women wrote to Holmes asking to be their housekeeper. Sherlock Holmes, asking him to find their stolen purse or their lost dog. Doyle began to receive massive amounts of fan mail – addressed to Mr.
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The stories were standalones, yet all included the same character – and people were hooked. Though Holmes first appeared in two novels that were not more than averagely popular, Doyle soon began writing about Holmes in short stories, and that’s where it all began. The hype over Sherlock Holmes began with the very publication of the stories themselves. It’s a fascinating history about what it means to love a story, to let it have power, and to be a fan (or a geek). To look back on the history of Sherlockianity (my word) is to look back on the emergence of a phenomenon and the formation of much of fandom as we know it today – and some of fandom as, perhaps, we haven’t conceived of it. Long before the possibilities of today’s mediated world, he was one of the first characters to massively, irrevocably, step off the page and into the world, and refuse to get back on the page. The kind of hype surrounding Sherlock today very much resembles the hysteria around the time the stories were originally published in fact, Sherlock Holmes is arguably responsible for much of fandom as we know it today. Sherlock Holmes is – and has always been – nothing less than a phenomenon.