This book is part of over a century of marketing by the publishers who have held the rights to the Holmes series to keep selling these works as belonging at the birth of the detective genre. Holmes was created at a time when modern policing and scientific detective methods were being born, and this is the reason there are few detective stories written prior to the first Holmes story. This type of fiction has been utilized for governments to propagate for bigger governments because it turns police into all-knowing superheroes capable of always spotting the evil-doer. In modern times, the media is more interested in covering cases of police misconduct and wrongful convictions and executions of the innocent, but this only makes it more necessary for governments to propagate for these myths of infallibility. Even Doyle saw Holmes in a negative light, inserting an opium addiction and other character flaws into the character, but these are sidelined or turned into sins shared with the similarly morally questionable but otherwise impeccable modern police forces. Fan fiction and puffing critics of Holmes build this myth to modern audiences many of whom might have seen TV series or films about Holmes without reading Doyle’s originals. Each of these new adaptations stands to make billions, and so there is a sea of marketing dollars to fund puffed reviews or these types of collections of favorable fan-scholarship.
From this perspective we can now consider the book’s description: “Sherlock Holmes is the most famous fictional detective in history, with a popularity that has never waned since catching the imagination of his late-Victorian readership. This Companion explores Holmes’ popularity and his complex relationship to the late-Victorian and modernist periods; on one hand bearing the imprint of a range of Victorian anxieties and preoccupations, while on the other shaping popular conceptions of criminality, deviance, and the powers of the detective.” You can see how the realities of the pro-police marketing and puffery of the Holmes production lines is spun as an all-loved, society-assisting venture. “‘Contexts’ explores late-Victorian culture, from the emergence of detective fiction to ideas of evolution, gender, and Englishness. ‘Case Studies’ reads selected Holmes adventures in the context of empire, visual culture, and the gothic. Finally, ‘Holmesian Afterlives’ investigates the relationship between Holmes and literary theory, film and theatre adaptations, new Holmesian novels, and the fandom that now surrounds him.” Fandom is sold in scholarly studies as a phenomenon that occurs naturally, as those who like groups of texts gravitate spontaneously towards purchasing the fan fiction, adaptations, toys, Halloween costumes and other affiliated products; in reality, fandom is artificially created by marketers representing these brands. The editors of this collection fail to acknowledge their own participation in selling these products, though to more sophisticated readers; they turn the bias into a seeming affliction with fan-mania. The collection might have been more convincing if its guardians were more detached and critical of the fever of fandom they have collected.
The interior might thus be more revealing than this façade. In an opening chapter on the “History of Detective Fiction”, Merrick Burrow explains that the earliest fans of Doyle’s Holmes stories wrote to Holmes in the hope of being hired as his “domestic servants” or helping his “bookkeeping” (15). I have come across other writers having similar problems after publishing popular works: these are usually grifters who attempt to latch on to people they perceive to have money to milk these resources; the same problem is common among modern athletes who go bankrupt because they lose money to such grifters despite early hundreds of millions. Senseless interest in a story is unlikely whereas an interest in grifting the author, or the author’s interest in forming a perception that he has a fan-base to encourage future publications are monetarily-motivated situations that can be substantiated with this type of research. Burrow then does a good job summarizing the precursors that led to the structure of detective fiction that Doyle settled on, including Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), which “sold over 300,000 copies”. It is pretty common in genre studies for the texts chosen as genre-founding to not really be the first of their kind or the most popular upon release, so these types of “precursor” explanations make the assertion of originality grounded in truthful reflections on the texts the “original” is mimicking (16). While the chapters on context, genre, and policing in Doyle’s time are useful for scholars, the chapters on fandom are more digressive, uncertain, fumbling, and lacking in logic or coherent theory. For example, Bran Nicol concludes his essay with confused ponderings: “What if, in this spirit, we acknowledge that Doyle was not writing short stories but producing novel exercises in literary theory…” He then goes on to explain how this might be the case in his final paragraph, having failed to address this hypothesis earlier. Then, he notes: “The Holmes stories may be formulaic and repetitive, but they are also thrilling…” etc., etc. “when we consider—as many theorists have encouraged us to do—what they can teach us about literature” (197). The note about theorists encouraging readers to see what Doyle is teaching about literature is indeed revealing. Why do theorists keep stressing that we are to learn from Doyle’s theory? If, as Nicol himself concludes the stories are “repetitive”, then they can only teach readers how to write similarly repetitive stories. Theorists who explain these stories must describe these repetitive patterns, but some critics opt to avoid this by instead referring to the lessons readers can learn for themselves regarding the presented “thrills”; in misdirecting readers thus, the theorists avoid having to dig into the science of repetition, and they help support the marketing of the Holmes brand by telling readers that if they fail to see the brilliance of the proposed thrills, they are incompetent at reading.
This book contains a lot of honest and shocking points regarding the Holmes manufactured “fandom”, but these intricate jokes and criticisms of this industry will only be apparent to scholars who have been studying this subject for decades. Readers who are new to Holmes studies might be mislead into imagining these texts are brilliant, flawless and worthy of continuing worship, at the cost of much better writers who might represent a more negative take on detectives, or who might offer an anti-formulaic innovative storylines, but lack the funding to match this Holmesian marketing machine.