Books
One of the first attempts was made in response to the 'Great Hiatus' (when Arthur Conan-Doyle decided not to write any more stories, to the dismay of his fans). Stepping into the breach, in 1897, John Kendrick Bangs wrote Pursuit of the House-Boat (a sequel to his A House-Boat on the Styx), in which a deceased-gentlemen's-club house-boat is stolen, whereupon Holmes arrives to help his fellow-deceased track down the boat by chartering a ship from Hades to London. Bangs' version of Holmes then comments to himself:
"For now," he said, with a chuckle, "I can get back to earth again free of cost on my own hook, whether my eminent inventor wants me there or not. I never approved of his killing me off as he did at the very height of my popularity."
However in 1894 Conan Doyle decided to return to writing, bringing Holmes back from the dead by claiming he had faked his death in The Empty House. While Bangs' attempt was reverential, Maurice Leblanc decided to write the short story "Sherlock Holmes arrive trop tard" ("Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late"). In it, Holmes meets the young thief Lupin for a brief time, unaware that he is, in fact, Lupin. After legal objections from Conan Doyle, the name was changed to "Herlock Sholmès" when the story was collected in bookform in Volume 1. Holmes returned in two more stories collected in Volume 2, "Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmès", having opened the floodgates to less flattering versions of Holmes as we shall see. One of the more recent parodies in print is "The Lord Mike Saga", where 'Mycroft Miles' (née Mills) is the Holmes figure, with the titles reflecting the styles: "A Study in Varlets", "The Strange Case of the Moth-Eater of Clapham Common", "Happy Times and Places" and "A Cameo Broached". Miles refuses to talk of Holmes, referring to him only as 'the other chap'.
Frequent speculation as the 'real' Holmes has existed since publication, and Mark Frost's novels The List of Seven and its sequel The Six Messiahs are merely the latest to put a spin on this. He has Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as its main character and tells the (fictional) story of how Doyle's Holmes was inspired by Johnathon Sparks, a mysterious man who saves Doyle's life from a mad occultist. The Wold Newton family series connects multiple famous fictional characters together to a mail coach that passed a radioactive asteroid in the eighteenth century - Holmes is a descendant of one of the travelers in that coach
Read more about this topic: Popular Culture References To Sherlock Holmes
Famous quotes containing the word books:
“Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“No common-place is ever effectually got rid of, except by essentially emptying one’s self of it into a book; for once trapped in a book, then the book can be put into the fire, and all will be well. But they are not always put into the fire; and this accounts for the vast majority of miserable books over those of positive merit.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pester’d the world ever convince me of the contrary.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)