Conan Doyle’s Children, Or, Thoughts on the Competition

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In 1974 when I published The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, I had two distinct advantages: though there had been occasional Holmes pastiches before, I essentially had a clear field, my only real competition being Doyle himself, and… I had the novelty of a story in which Holmes encounters and joins forces with Sigmund Freud. As much as any innate quality the book possessed, I believe it was its novelty that startled and delighted.

No more. Nowadays my competition is a host of imitators imitating me imitating Doyle. Novelty per se is no longer the criterion by which Holmes pastiches are judged. What those criteria now are, I suspect, is subject to endless debate. The word pastiche itself has become pejorative—as if all works of art were not cut and paste jobs. (As Michael Chabon observed, “all fiction is fan fiction”. What are The Odyssey and the Aeneid, after all, but fanboy spinoffs from the Iliad?)

Complicating matters is the fact that all works of art are ineluctably products of the time in which they are created. Mozart doesn’t just sound like Mozart; he sounds like late 18th century middle European music. Renoir, invincibly Renoir, also looks like late nineteenth century French Impressionism. But this reality plays havoc with forgers, for their works too are inevitably the products of the times and prejudices under which they were fashioned. This must include Doyle/Holmes imitators, for their forgeries too are inevitably products of the circumstances in which they were written. Thus, like hairstyles in movies and other details of fashion or viewpoint that vary from year to year, “dated” or unpalatable aspects of one era’s Holmes (racism, drug addition, misogyny), are pruned or replaced by more “politically correct” attributes. None of us Holmes pastiche writers are immune from this revisionist reality, though admittedly some have managed to conceal contemporary biases more successfully than others.

I confess I find it difficult to read the competition, not, I hasten to add, because I judge the work of others to be inferior, rather because I fear the reverse. My insecurities are so great that I worry reading what I take to be superior Holmes pastiches will immobilize my own efforts. Still worse, I worry that I may slip into imitating the imitators, drifting away from my own take on Doyle in favor of others’. When I began writing as Watson, I did so out of a conviction—right or absurdly wrong—that I and I alone could channel Doyle’s sensibility. As time has passed, I realize this conviction, which once served me well, has become outdated and disproved. But regardless, it is my sensibility superimposed on “Watson’s” that is all I have to offer. At the end of the day, all any writer, painter or composer—all any artist has to offer—is themselves.

At the end of the day, all any writer, painter or composer—all any artist has to offer—is themselves.

Were I to hazard a generalized critique of Holmes pastiches I have read, it would go something like this. I remain convinced that slavish imitations of what has gone before would never have satisfied Doyle and in the long run run the risk of turning subsequent imitations into a species of taxidermy. Imitators who, for example, boast of never using a word Doyle didn’t employ seem to me to be missing the point. Straitjacketed by such “rules”, spontaneity goes out the window and without spontaneity—or at least the appearance of spontaneity—life goes out the window as well. Characters become wind-up toys or model trains, always running along the same set of tracks amid meticulously replicated but frozen landscapes. It can’t always be 1895. If Holmes and Watson don’t grow and change, they will stultify. Purists, or those who style themselves purists, may quarrel with this idea, insisting that Holmes must somehow always remain “the same”. I only offer it as an opinion that we will ultimately tire of staring at stuffed teddy bears. I realize that I am proposing a counterintuitive if not paradoxical thesis: that in order for Holmes to remain the same he must, somehow, change. How can this be managed?

While conceding that the greatest Holmes stories—(we all can name our favorites)—are a) short, b) take place in England and c) frequently involve what Holmes terms “the outre” rather than conventional “high stakes” issues, for myself, I’ve found that getting Holmes out of London and ultimately out of 1895 helps free him from life in a vitrine. With the exception of The West End Horror, my second Holmes novel, I’ve managed to get Holmes into Austria, France, Tsarist Russia and now, Egypt. By trying to make Holmes a fish out of (Thames) water, I hope to retain key elements and aspects of his character, while obliging them to react to scenery or circumstances with which the detective is arguably unfamiliar. Whether this stratagem is successful or not is obviously not for me to determine. And again, it must be admitted that I am not the first to attempt this. There is sci-fi Holmes, porno Holmes and 21st Century American Holmes. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

Finally, there is the possibility—if not the inevitability—that we will have too much Holmes, that the detective and his amanuensis will become a glut on the market. When I wrote The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, I was reviewed in the New York Times; now that paper disdains the cluttered field of pastiche and one has to see their difficulty. If one were to attempt reading all the pseudo Watson narratives—Holmes’s daughter, his sister, his brother, Irene Adler, the Irregulars, professor Moriarty et al ad nauseum—one would never live to read anything else.

So, the reader may wonder, why do we keep writing them? Speaking for myself, I write Holmes for the reasons I read him: to spend time in his reassuring company. The world, one hardly need point out, seems a more treacherous, uncertain and chaotic place than ever before. Retreating for a time to an era where things were presumably simpler, is to indulge a sort of comfort food. Holmes as mashed potatoes. Tolstoy said that the purpose of art is to teach us to love life, but it might also be argued that art can sometimes help us endure or escape life.

I think I understand my competitors.

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