Playing Lazarus with Sherlock Holmes
“The Final Problem” was, it is has become clearer with each passing decade since its publication in 1893, one of the first exposures of what fandom can do. It also was a testament to the attachment readers had formed not only for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes but to the universe he created around him, his friendship with Watson, his connections in London and Scotland Yard, and an accumulating narrative. Unlike more recent examples, Doyle didn’t have a precedence to test his readers (it could be argued he set the precedence with this story). He simply didn’t care enough what they thought. His mind was made up to kill his famous sleuth to, as he wrote to his mother, pursue other callings even at the expense of his bread and butter. Fandom, however, was then a relatively unknown phenomenon and the shocking death of the detective he had been writing about for six years set off a literary fury the likes of which had not be seen outside of scandalous writing. However ...