Sherlock Holmes is an international icon, as much a part of popular culture as Dracula and James Bond – perhaps more so, as to date he has been portrayed by seventy-five actors in two hundred and eleven films, more than any other character real or imagined. Millions of people believe he existed, and the myth is propagated by hundreds of societies, numerous biographies, and countless essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation; in 2002, the Royal Society of Chemistry even bestowed an Extraordinary Honorary Fellowship upon him.

Sir Arthur introduced Holmes to the world in A Study in Scarlet, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887. The novella established the world’s first consulting detective and his companion, Dr John H. Watson in 221B Baker Street – a fictional address that still receives mail today. Three more novellas and fifty-six short stories were to follow over the next forty years, comprising the Canon, which – in contemporary terms – is equivalent to about six novels. From this relatively small genesis, a 1995 survey estimated an astonishing twenty-five thousand books, films, plays, and games featuring Holmes, published and performed in thirty-five different languages.

Sir Arthur soon tired of him, however, and planned to end the series with The Adventure of the Copper Beeches in 1892.He relented for commercial considerations, but ended Holmes’s life a year later, in the dramatic duel entitled The Final Problem. There was public outcry, but it was eight years before Holmes reappeared, in his most famous case, The Hound of the Baskervilles, set before his death. In 1903 Sir Arthur relented, and resurrected Holmes in The Adventure of the Empty House, after his Great Hiatus, three years during which he travelled the world incognito. This began the second part of the Great Detective’s career, which included clientele of the calibre of two British premiers (The Adventure of the Second Stain, 1904; and The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone, 1921), and the King himself (The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, 1925).
As the name suggests, His Last Bow, published in 1917, was intended to be the final Holmes story. It was even subtitled ‘An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes’, and confirmed that he had retired to the South Downs, in Sussex, to keep bees, in 1903. In 1921, Sir Arthur took up his pen yet again, revisiting Holmes’s adventures after the Great Hiatus in another twelve stories, ending with The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place in 1927. By the time of Sir Arthur’s death three years later, there were already hundreds of parodies, plays, songs, films, and unauthorised stories featuring Holmes, who was firmly established in the cultural consciousness of the English-speaking world.

Films, parodies, and pastiche continued, but it wasn’t until the success of Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Percent Solution in 1974 that popularity reached present proportions. Meyer compounded the success of his novel by writing the screenplay for the 1976 film, and two years later Sir Arthur’s work entered the public domain. With Holmes out of copyright, his new adventures began in earnest, and the resultant flood of pastiche continued relatively unabated for the next twenty-five years. The options for readers in the twenty-first century are thus bewildering. For the sake of coming to grips with the amount of material on offer, pastiche can be classified into four groups.

The first are stories based on Watson’s numerous references to Holmes’s unpublished cases in the Canon. These tend to be the most faithful imitations and the finest is The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur’s son, Adrian Conan Doyle, and John Dickson Carr, published in 1954. The second group includes new adventures which are not based on any of Watson’s references, but still attempt to recreate the style of the Canon. These are often almost indistinguishable from the first, an excellent example being the 2005 The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr. The third group consists of adventures that introduce historical characters to Baker Street, such as Sigmund Freud in Meyer’s groundbreaking work. The fourth matches Holmes with other fictional characters; Dracula in The Tangled Skein by David Stuart Davies in 2006 is one of the best of this group.

Each category contains both triumphs and catastrophes, however, and the only place to start is the Canon itself, now available in thousands of different editions:
Novellas:
A Study in Scarlet, 1887
The Sign of the Four, 1890
The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1901
The Valley of Fear, 1914
Short Stories:
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894
The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905
His Last Bow, 1917
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1927

The game is – still – very much afoot.