Introduction

SOME fictional characters who began life in the imagination of their authors have taken on a separate existence, no longer dependent on the stories in which they first appeared—Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman; Tarzan, Fu Manchu; and even James Bond.

But, most obviously, there is Sherlock Holmes. According to one count, Holmes has appeared in more than 250 movie and television adaptations, some of which have only the slightest connection to the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes has become the image of the Great Detective—his piercing, hawk like gaze; his instant deductions; his examination of the crime scene for physical evidence; and his admiring Watson character. Nowadays, when we see such a spate of Holmes pastiches, it is difficult to remember that this image of Holmes began very early.

Sherlock Holmes first appeared in the short novel A Study in Scarlet in 1887, followed by The Sign of Four (1890), but his popularity did not take off until Doyle began a series of short stories for the Strand Magazine, beginning with “A Scandal in Bohemia” in the July 1891 edition, and concluding with the “death” (or, at least, the disappearance) of Holmes at Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem,” December 1893— the stories collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. They were followed by what Holmesians often call “the Great Hiatus,” until Doyle brought Holmes back a decade later.

But even before Reichenbach, Holmes had gained such recognition that parodies already had begun to appear. One of the finest was Robert Barr’s “The Great Pegram Mystery”—featuring Sherlaw Kombs—published in The Idler, May 1892, less than a year after the first Holmes short story. Barr would later write about failures of “the celebrated London detective, Mr. Cadbury Taylor”—clearly based on Holmes—in a story published in Jennie Baxter, Journalist in 1899. Jennie solves the crime, making her one of the early female sleuths in fiction and, arguably, the first journalist detective. Later, Barr would create a humorous, bombastic sleuth in The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont (1906), whose egotism is sometimes considered a commentary on Holmes.

Shortly after Barr’s first parody, “The Great Pegram Mystery,” the renowned humor magazine Punch began the first parody cycle of Holmes stories. There were the Picklock Holes tales by R. C. Lehmann, beginning with “The Bishop’s Crime,” August 12, 1893. When Holmes vanished over Reichenbach Falls, Picklock also departed in “Picklock’s Disappearance,” January 13, 1894.

During the Hiatus, some writers recognized that Sherlock Holmes had gone to the afterlife. John Kendrick Bangs, an American humorist who time and again wrote Holmes parodies, had Holmes show up with other shades in an episodic novel set on the River Styx, The Pursuit of the Houseboat, published in 1897. Two years later, Bangs wrote a series of short stories supposedly created by members of a club while dreaming. The book, called, naturally enough, The Dreamers: A Club, featured a parody of Sherlock Holmes: “The fact that women don’t reason,” explains Holmes, “does not prove that they can’t”—and other pearls of wisdom. The same year, Bangs developed another clever conceit: James Boswell would dictate stories featuring historical and fictional characters, such as Henry VIII, Xanthippe, Hamlet, and so on. The Enchanted Typewriter has two Holmes adventures in a single chapter (the second of which, “Sherlock Holmes Again,” is included here); Holmes is now in Hades solving crimes.

Bangs continued to satirize fictional characters. The target in Mrs. Raffles (1905) is The Amateur Cracksman by Doyle’s brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung. As Doyle had done, Hornung killed off his famous character, but Bangs postulated that his wife, Mrs. A. J. Raffles, would continue his thieving ways (and, like Holmes, Raffles would appear in later stories, but set before his death). All this led naturally to another one of Bangs’s imaginative ideas in R. Holmes & Co. (1906). Raffles Holmes is the son of Holmes and the grandson of A. J. Raffles, and one of the features of the stories is that R. Holmes is torn between his thieving and his detecting personas. In “The Adventure of the Missing Pendants,” Bangs writes, “Holmes’s better nature asserted itself; Raffles was subdued.”

Another response to the Great Hiatus was Allen Upward’s “The Adventure of the Stolen Doormat” from The Wonderful Career of Ebenezer Lobb Related by Himself (1900), which also assumed that Holmes was dead. Upward had been involved with international issues, which he fictionalized in two books, Secrets of the Courts of Europe (1897) and Secret History of To-Day (1904). He also wrote books of philosophy and Imagist poetry, which received the praise of Ezra Pound. Upward committed suicide in 1926, apparently depressed because of a lack of critical recognition. His Holmes parody is much more lighthearted than his poetry and philosophical writings.

Bret Harte is remembered primarily for his work “The Outcasts of Poker Flats” and other western stories, but he was also a fine parodist. His first book, Condensed Novels (1867) captures the stylistic quirks of contemporary novelists, including some who would influence detective fiction—Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Henry Wood, and Mary E. Braddon. Many years later, Harte wrote a second series of Condensed Novels (1902), which included the Holmes parody “The Stolen Cigar Case,” which, in the opinion of Ellery Queen, is “one of the most devastating parodies” ever written about Sherlock Holmes. Certainly the opening paragraph neatly skewers Holmes and Watson.

Another major literary figure who took detective fiction as his subject was Mark Twain. His early story “The Stolen White Elephant” (1882) is a humorous take-off on the style of detective fiction that preceded Doyle and A Study in Scarlet. More than two decades passed before Twain returned to the form in the second half of Pudd’n’head Wilson (1894), one of the first stories to be resolved through the examination of fingerprints. Then came Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), clearly a pot-boiler, and, according to a contemporary review, “poorly conceived and badly put together.” The novelette A Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1902) begins as a sensational novel and then becomes a burlesque of detective fiction. It features Fetlock Jones, a nephew of the great Holmes, and then Sherlock Holmes himself.

After Holmes returned from the dead, writers continued to make him the subject of parodies. Headon Hill (the pseudonym of Francis Edward Grainger) began his literary career with a series of short stories about Sebastian Zambra in Clues from a Detective’s Camera (1893) and Zambra the Detective (1894), followed by many sensational novels and short stories. Though his early stories were straightforward tales of a great detective, clearly modeled on the success of the Holmes stories in The Strand, his tales in Radford Shone (1908) make fun of the Holmes style. Radford Shone and his “wooly-brained admirer . . . who lives with him” make instant deductions and seem to run rings around the police, but they are, ultimately, wrong, and Shone’s use of Holmes’s methods show how erroneous they can be.

Maurice Leblanc created in the burglar Arsène Lupin one of the great characters in crime fiction. In the final story in his first book, Arsène Lupin Gentleman-Cambrioleur (1907), Lupin meets “Herlock Sholmès” and “Wilson.” The novella and novelette in the succeeding book, Arsène Lupin Contre Herlock Sholmès (1908), continue Lupin’s contest against the English sleuth. In the English translations, he is renamed Holmlock Shears—“a sort of miracle of intuition,” writes Leblanc, “of perspicacity, of shrewdness . . . . Anyone hearing of the adventures of which have made the name of Holmlock Shears famous all over the world must feel inclined to ask if he is not a legendary person, a hero who has stepped straight from the brain of some great novelist, of a Conan Doyle, for instance.”

O. Henry was another important author who caught the bug of Holmes imitation. He wrote three stories featuring a New York detective named Shamrock Jolnes, who, in “The Sleuths,” from Sixes and Sevens (1911) competes with another detective, named Juggins. O. Henry often used New York as a setting, and in this tale the background is as important as—perhaps even more important than—the parody.

The very similarly named Shagbark Jones was the creation of prolific American humorist Ellis Parker Butler, who is remembered for his rural humor in such stories as “Pigs is Pigs” and in the comic detective series collected in Philo Gubb, Correspondence School Detective (1918). Like O. Henry’s characters, Shagbark Jones, whose stories appeared in Red Book magazine in 1917, is an American sleuth—a medicine man who combines fake potions with sleuthing.

Doyle again tried to bring Holmes’s career to an end in the story “His Last Bow,” published in The Strand, September 1917, collected the same year in His Last Bow. Other authors tried to fill the gap. J. Storer Clouston was a prolific novelist who had found success with the comic novel The Lunatic at Large (1899), which had among its characters a Dr. Sherlaw and a Dr. (Timothy) Watson, but otherwise had no Sherlockian connections. Carrington’s Cases (1920), however, has a clever story that features a not-very-competent Dr. Watson sleuthing during Holmes’s retirement.

It’s a pleasure to end this anthology with what may be the finest pure pastiche—with only the slightest hint of parody—ever written about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Vincent Starrett was one of the most important “bookmen” of the first half of the twentieth century: an editor, essayist, journalist, poet, novelist, and short story writer. With the Holmes stories under copyright, Starrett published “The Adventure of the Unique Hamlet” in a limited edition—probably 110 copies in all. Nonetheless, he had the temerity to send a copy to Doyle, who responded that he had enjoyed it. The parody in the story, of course, is not about Holmes, but about the madness of book collectors, of which Starrett was one.

Douglas G. Greene