A Study in Sherlock

AN INTRODUCTION Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger

Only true genius can produce an invention, or a hero, that fills a gaping hole in our lives we never knew—never even suspected—was there. For millennia, we were perfectly content with pen and paper; then e-mail was introduced and now no one can live without it. Paintings and lithographs held all the rich vocabulary of visual creation—until photography became our native tongue. And we had a whole raft of heroes to tell stories about: why on earth would we need a self-described “consulting detective” with misanthropic attitudes and unsavory habits?

But one day in 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle sat down to write a tale of an odd young man with peculiar skills and changed the world. A Study in Scarlet is indeed a young man’s story, packed to overflowing with Romantic Adventure and startling ideas, with thrilling lines (lines a modern editor might blue-pencil as melodramatic) such as “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

In no time at all, an entire industry of homages and satires, pastiches and parodies sprang up around Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was imagined in a thousand non-Doylean manifestations: married; in exotic climes; paired with historical and literary figures; made younger, older, taller, shorter, more robotic, more emotional, nearly every variation conceivable. Conan Doyle himself wrote non-Holmes stories that were yet openly patterned on the character. That previously unsuspected gaping hole in our lives (the size and import of which Sir Arthur refused to acknowledge) proved to bear the shape of nothing short of an archetype: a modern-day knight errant; a man whose passion for righting wrongs is mistaken for a cold intellectual curiosity; a tortured hero with but a single friend; a man who never lived “and so can never die,” who is more alive today than any other resident of the Victorian Age, including Victoria herself.

The tales in this volume show eighteen top writers exploring the contours and boundaries of that archetype, playing with the ideas of how this Platonic ideal of a detecting hero might look in different situations, wearing a variety of faces. Some recount untold adventures of the Master Detective; others look at him from fresh perspectives; still others listen to the echoes of his passing.

All are stories inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his first study in Sherlock.

Laurie R. King is the award-winning (Edgar, Creasey, Agatha, Nero, Lambda, Macavity) and bestselling author of a score of crime novels, half of them featuring “the world’s greatest detective—and her husband, Sherlock Holmes.” Mary Russell (The Beekeeper’s Apprentice; Pirate King) has been described as a young, female, twentieth-century Holmes, a gent whom she finds wandering through 1915 Sussex looking for bees and promptly insults. King’s temerity was rewarded by induction into the Baker Street Irregulars, where she was put to work editing Holmes-related books, both fiction and non-, by her Irregular betters, in a thinly disguised attempt to keep her from writing more Russellian novels. Her books and a whole lot of somewhat related academic material can be found at www.LaurieRKing.com.

Leslie S. Klinger is the Edgar-winning editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a collection of the entire Sherlock Holmes Canon with an almost endless quantity of footnotes and appendices. He also edited the highly regarded The New Annotated Dracula and numerous anthologies of Victorian detective and vampire fiction and criticism. Working with Neil Gaiman, he is currently editing The Annotated Sandman for DC Comics. Klinger is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars and teaches for UCLA Extension on Holmes, Dracula, and the Victorian world. A lawyer by day, Klinger lives in Los Angeles with his wife, dog, and three cats. He first met Sherlock Holmes and his world in 1968, while attending law school, through the pages of William S. Baring-Gould’s 1967 classic The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, and was hooked for life. This anthology is the result of discovering that many of his seemingly normal writer-friends shared his passion for the Holmes stories.