This post was originally published on Audible.com.
More than a century before we could clamor online for the next Stephen King or George R. R. Martin novel, found himself beset by legions of readers who loved Sherlock Holmes, the fictional detective who first appeared in print in 1887’s “A Study in Scarlet.” By 1891, The Strand literary magazine in London had begun publishing and promoting stories about , whose passions included Victorian-era forensic science, deductive reasoning, and cocaine, and whose exploits were (mostly) narrated by Holmes’s polar opposite comrade-in-arms, Dr. Watson. By 1893 Conan Doyle wanted to extricate himself from the demands of a huge, devoted, and ravenous readership, and so he wrote a short story aptly named “The Final Problem.” Holmes revealed to Watson the existence of uber-villain Professor Moriarty, and while fighting said nemesis, Holmes plunged from Reichenbach Falls into “that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam.” Problem solved, or so thought the author…
Reichenbach Falls is a real place in Switzerland, known to Conan Doyle’s audience as a death drop. Even though the term “cliffhanger” had come into existence only in 1892 (I Google so you don’t have to!), my personal opinion is that Conan Doyle was aware of the term, and definitively penned a scene where, from the cliff, there was no hanging! Unfortunately, the author seemed to have been surprised by the existence of “fans,” which was a shortened version of “fanatics,” coined in 1892 (thanks again, Google!) for devotees of American football. Sherlock Holmes fans stunned Conan Doyle with their outrage over their favorite character’s demise; The Strand almost went under from the volume of canceled subscriptions, and one letter written to Conan Doyle saluted him as “You Brute!”
He eventually caved to the audience demand, first with a “flashback” to when Holmes was still alive in the timeline, the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles—serialized in 1901 and 1902 in the long-suffering Strand—and then eventually with a short story that restored Sherlock Holmes to life: “The Adventure of the Empty House.” In that story, Holmes explains to Watson that he faked his death to confound his enemies, but doesn’t explain the gap in the timeline between 1891 and 1894, a period known by Holmesologists as “The Great Hiatus.” Today Guinness World Records lists Sherlock Holmes as the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history, an achievement due in no small part to what we now call “the fandom.” The 56 short stories and four novels (all available in audio if you click through the list below) set in Victorian and Edwardian Europe, written between 1887 and 1927, constitute the cradle of that fandom, the Holmes original canon.
