WATT, Peter Ridgway and Joseph Green

The Alternative Sherlock Holmes. Pastiches, Parodies and Copies

      Williston, VT: Ashgate, 2003, First Edition. boards. New. . quarto, . Between 1887 and 1927, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote sixty Sherlock Holmes stories, and his great Canon has become the most praised, most studied, and best-known chapter in the history of detective fiction. Over twenty thousand publications pertaining to the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon are known to have been published, most of them historical and critical studies. In addition, however, almost since the first stories appeared, such was their uniqueness and extraordinary attraction that other authors began writing stories based on or derived from them. A new genre had appeared: pastiches; parodies; burlesques; and stories that attempted to copy or rival the great detective himself. As the field widened, there was hardly a year in the twentieth century in which new short stories or novels did not appear. Many hundreds are now known to have been published, some of them written by authors well-known for their work in other literary fields: John Kendrick Bangs, Jon L. Breen, Agatha Christie, August Derleth, Philip Jose Farmer, Maurice Leblanc, Ellery Queen, Vincent Starrett, and many, many more. Presented as an entertaining narrative, of interest to both the aficionado and the scholar, it provides full bibliographic data on virtually all the known stories in the field.