Sherlock Holmes’ fan fiction legacy is so much older than you think

Arthur Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes. Yes, it’s true—the character who brought him so much fame and fortune was also, arguably, his worst enemy.

The reasons behind Doyle’s dislike of the world’s most brilliant and famous detective are complicated, as TV presenter, historian, and Sherlock Holmes mega-fan Lucy Worsley meticulously explains in her new documentary series, Lucy Worsley’s Holmes. vs. Doyle. Doyle came from a financially unstable childhood and, in response, did everything in his power to climb up the social ladder, become the perfect male specimen, and prove himself as a literary genius. And yet, he thought our beloved Sherlock was a burden; or, as Worsley explained when I spoke to her during a press roundtable for her upcoming series, Doyle saw him as a “low-brow, trashy” character, one that was holding him back from mingling with the upper ranks of Britain’s high society.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s hatred of Sherlock didn’t stop him from profiting off the series though, even after he successfully managed to kill off the intrepid detective in The Adventure of the Final Problem. As Worsley uncovers throughout Holmes vs. Doyle, the eminent author became financially dependent on Holmes—none of his other literary works, including his historical fiction, panned out as well as Sherlock’s adventures did. In the end, Doyle was forced to convolutedly bring Sherlock Holmes back from the dead, forever cementing the detective’s status as a literary and pop culture icon.

Of course, today, we can barely imagine a world without Sherlock Holmes. Hundreds of adaptations and “spinoffs,” for lack of a better term, have been produced following the 62 officially published Sherlock Holmes stories, changing our understanding of the detective forevermore. If you’re jonesing for some Holmes, there’s plenty to watch, read, or listen to, but you can also find new Sherlock Holmes stories in the darkest corners of the internet. I’m talking, of course, about fan fiction.

Fan fiction writers love Sherlock Holmes

Nowadays, fan fiction is a well-known and widely accepted concept—a hobby shared by those who enjoy exploring established characters, worlds, and plotlines on their terms without being confined by the rules of canon. It’s a great way for budding writers to explore their craft and for readers to further immerse themselves in the cinematic universes, books, and TV series they obsess over. Though not all fan fiction is equally good, it is, by and large, a labor of love, and Sherlock Holmes is a major part of its legacy.

For instance, on Archive of Our Own, one of the biggest fan-fiction collections on the internet, the “Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms” category boasts nearly 137,000 works. The Sherlock TV category, which is meant solely for stories based on the BBC’s massively popular adaptation starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, contains over 120,000 works.

For context, this is more than the fandom tag for “TOLKIEN J.R.R. – Works & Related Fandoms” (103,269 works), and the “A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms” category (98,413). The only fandoms to beat Sherlock Holmes on Archive of Our Own are (predictably) Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Harry Potter, the DCU, Supernatural, and a few anime, manga, and video game franchises. Let’s be honest, though—it’s impressive that Sherlock Holmes can ignite such passion mostly on his own, whereas most of those fandoms listed rely on dozens, if not hundreds of characters and storylines.

But Sherlock Holmes’ fan fiction legacy didn’t start with the BBC’s Sherlock. It didn’t start with any of the movies, TV shows, or radio plays that came before it, either. No, as Worsley reveals, Sherlock Holmes fan fiction was already being written when Arthur Conan Doyle was still alive.

In the aftermath of Sherlock’s death in Switzerland, readers took to creating their own Sherlock Holmes stories—this, of course, is still one of the main reasons writers and readers turn to fan fiction, as it’s a way to mourn the death of a beloved character. This situation was different, however, as these new stories were being encouraged by Tit-Bits magazine, an actual publisher running a competition for “fans to write their own Sherlock Holmes stories and get them published.”

In the documentary’s third episode, Worsley meets with Dr. Clare Clarke, an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin, who explained that this was really the first time fan fiction became seen as a mainstream activity:

“This period is really the first time we get a community coming together in pursuit of a kind of fan-fiction culture. This is actually the publisher who was inviting the reading public to really have a very active participation in the creation of the Sherlock myth … I think they’re really interested in pushing Sherlock in different directions that Doyle had not gone into before. So, something that fans seem to be interested in is the idea of giving Sherlock a girlfriend.”

Sound familiar? Both Worsley and Clarke agree that then and now, people turn to fan fiction as a type of “wish fulfillment” by placing Sherlock into situations and genres they couldn’t find in Doyle’s works. Interestingly enough, when Worsley asked Clarke how Doyle felt about these competitions, she explained that he, surprisingly, didn’t mind so much—he was tired of writing Sherlock, and so the fans were giving him ideas; he merely had to execute them. As Worsley puts it, he was essentially interested in “crowdsourcing” concepts.

Of course, if the Tit-Bits magazine publisher had allowed that to happen, Doyle would still have retained ownership of his character, to some extent; he’d have been writing the stories, after all. When I asked Worsley how she believed he might feel about what’s been done with Sherlock Holmes in the 21st century, including more off-the-walls ideas like Enola Holmes and Elementary—which are, essentially, mass-produced works of fan-fiction (no shade!)—she thought he would have been much more apprehensive:

“I think that he would be kind of furious that those projects were getting made and not the biopic of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and all of his achievements. That’s what he would have preferred for us to be interested in. But having said that, I think that the series establishes quite well that he liked his material pleasures and he liked money. And if somebody was giving him a license for you to do it, as I imagine his estate is actually getting, then that might ease the pain a bit for him.”

I doubt that, when Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes story in 1887, he could have predicted the culture behemoth that Sherlock Holmes would become. For better or worse, Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the most beloved and most famous characters of all time, and that’s perhaps most obviously reflected in the amount of fan fiction Sherlock Holmes has inspired.

Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle premieres on PBS on December 8, with a new episode dropping weekly until December 22. The full series is available now on BBC iPlayer in the U.K. (titled Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley on the Case of Conan Doyle).