Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon
Laurie R. King
INTRODUCTION
by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger
A man on a mountainside shouts . . . and his words return, tumbled and shaped by the granite and grass they have encountered. A man in a too-quiet doctor’s office sets pen to paper . . . and generations later, the reverberations of his words are still felt.
Echoes of Sherlock Holmes is the third volume of short stories that are, as we requested from our writers, “inspired by the world of Holmes.” We did not ask for “Sherlock Holmes” stories—pastiches—or modern adaptations or commentaries: simply that the authors allow themselves to be inspired by Holmes. Then we stood back in awe.
Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887, the product of a young and not terribly successful Scottish doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes was a man of his times: London in Victoria’s Golden Jubilee year was a city of glittering jewels and silk hats, diseases and starving children, impenetrable fogs and millions of gaslights. Crossings-sweepers fought back the tide of dung from 300,000 horses. Boundless determination and energy were forging an empire.
Through this setting walked a “consulting detective” and his companions, solving crimes, setting lives back into order, defining not only an era but an entire genre of storytelling. The fifty-six short stories and four novels Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes continued to be published well into the twentieth century, but even in the later stories, there remains a whiff of the gaslight, the faint clop of horses’ hooves in the background.
An echo only results from a sharp and powerful source. A tentative noise will not bounce back against those hard surfaces; soft fiction never reverberates. A century and a half after Dr. Watson met an apparently mad young potential flat-mate in the laboratory of St. Bart’s Hospital, the echoes from that scene are still bouncing through the world of fiction. And to prove that the human imagination is more powerful than the laws of physics, the seventeen echoes contained in this volume stand on their own, miraculously undimmed by any distance from the origin.
New stories using the characters of Holmes and Watson are no longer, as a matter of law, controlled by the Conan Doyle Estate Limited (a company that holds the remaining copyrights for ten of the original stories). So long as creators don’t rely overly much on “protected elements” of those late stories, they are free to make up their own adventures. This was conclusively established in November 2014 when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to overturn the decision of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate Limited. Not that this seems to have slowed down the business practices of the Estate (which the 7th Circuit described as “a form of extortion”). For example, they attempted to block the elegiac Mr. Holmes (starring Sir Ian McKellen, based on Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind) by arguing that Holmes’s retirement was a “protected element,” since it is mentioned in a copyrighted story—even though Holmes’s retirement is also prominent in an unprotected story. (The case was resolved on undisclosed terms.)
Legal matters aside, one wonders what Conan Doyle would have made of the stories in the present volume. Some of them would confirm his beliefs as a Spiritualist: surely only automatic writing during a series of trances could explain his having forgotten Watson’s meeting with M. Dupin, Irene Adler’s unsuspected history, various prominent crimes, or the fact that Holmes’s fascination with bees began with a gun battle? As for these visitations of embodied characters—proof of ectoplasmic emanations given voice!
Others of these stories might speak more intimately to Conan Doyle’s non-Holmesian writing: a tale of evil on a remote and windswept island, 100 years in his future; a child who imagines himself a great detective.
Some, however, might have shocked even this Victorian author’s vivid imagination. Yes, he was a proponent of women’s rights (some of them, at any rate) but—a jeans-wearing young woman detective? Actresses in moving pictures? A detecting ladies’ maid? And what might he make of a detective story peopled by members of a black-power movement? Or a London that could snatch away law-abiding citizens—children, even—in the name of security? As for these revelations about Mrs. Hudson . . . ?
Sir Arthur would have put his foot down at that, to be sure.
All of which only goes to prove that when one is dealing with Sherlock Holmes, a man “who never lived and so can never die,” physics goes out the window. Rather than thinning out and fading, the Holmesian form is invigorated and made stronger with each reflecting surface (for remember, the word “inspire” means “breathe into”).
These stories prove that sometimes, echoes take on a life of their own.