Interestingly enough, Holmes’ intense following continues to this day, spawning endless reimaginings, such as the US crime-solving series Elementary and the BBC’s Sherlock, which returned with a highly-anticipated special on New Year’s Day, its modern-day Sherlock and Watson returning to Victorian times. Sherlock Holmes’ avid readers helped to create the very modern practice of fandom. They seemed to actually expect a reciprocal relationship with the works they loved. Now they were beginning to take their popular culture personally, and to expect their favourite works to conform to certain expectations.
The term, short for “fanatic”, had only recently begun use in reference to American baseball enthusiasts.) Readers typically accepted what went on in their favorite books, then moved on. (In fact, they weren’t even called “fans” yet.
#NOVEL SHERLOCK HOLMES APPEARED IN TORRENT#
But at the time, Conan Doyle had every reason to be shocked by the torrent of vitriol. This sounds, of course, like just another day on the internet in 2015. Conan Doyle stuck to his guns in the face of the protests, calling the death “justifiable homicide” – referring, presumably, to his own justifications, not Moriarty’s. Americans started “Let’s Keep Holmes Alive” clubs. (Some Holmes aficionados have suggested the story could have been an exaggeration perpetuated by Conan Doyle’s son in interviews.) Outraged readers wrote to the magazine in protest: “You brute!” one letter addressed to Conan Doyle began. Legend has it that young men throughout London wore black mourning crêpes on their hats or around their arms for the month of Holmes’ death, though that has recently been questioned. Its staff referred to Holmes’ death as “the dreadful event”. More than 20,000 Strand readers cancelled their subscriptions, outraged by Holmes’ premature demise. The public reaction to the death was unlike anything previously seen for fictional events. If he did think this, he did not understand fans – particularly fans of Holmes – very well. “THE PUBLIC REACTION TO HOLMES’ DEATH WAS UNLIKE ANYTHING PREVIOUSLY SEEN FOR FICTIONAL EVENTS.”Ĭonan Doyle may have thought, at the time of finishing Holmes off in print, that that was that. He later said of his famous character: “I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards paté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day.” One can imagine Conan Doyle, slicked-back hair shimmering in the candlelight, twirling his ample mustache with glee. “It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr Sherlock Holmes was distinguished,” narrator Dr John Watson says in Conan Doyle’s story The Final Problem, which appeared in The Strand magazine in December 1893.Ĭonan Doyle himself seemed a little less emotional in private. But Conan Doyle did the dirty work from his home in London where he wrote. The cliff was fictionally located in Switzerland, over the Reichenbach Falls. In 1893, author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shoved detective Sherlock Holmes off a cliff. The credit of this Sherlock Holmes Sinhala Translation book images collection goes to