Next Saturday, Aug. 22, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the University of San Diego, KPBS will host its annual San Diego Book Festival. The event is free for book lovers of all ages. Attendees willenjoy panel discussions with award-winning authors, activities, live entertainment, exhibitors including local authors, and independent booksellers. I will be manning my book booth, #45, along with a host of other authors in rows cleverly named Writers\u2019 Block. I\u2019d love to meet you at the festival.<\/p>\n
Literature lives. Literature endures. Literature prevails. That\u2019s because readers bestow a special kind of life upon people who have existed only in books. Figments though they may be, literary characters can assume a vitality and longevity that pulse more powerfully than flesh and blood.<\/p>\n
Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s 60 stories about Sherlock Holmes, the world\u2019s first consulting detective, have been translated into more 98 languages, from Arabic to Yiddish. Readers everywhere recognize the intrepid sleuth\u2019s deerstalker hat, Inverness cape, calabash pipe, and magnifying glass. Some say that Sherlock Holmes is the most famous man who never lived.<\/p>\n
In December of 1887, Sherlock Holmes came into the world unheralded in A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton\u2019s Christmas Annual. When, not long after, The Strand Magazine began the monthly serialization of the first dozen short stories titled \u201cThe Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,\u201d the issues sold tens of thousands of copies, and the public clamored for more.<\/p>\n
At the height of success, however, the creator wearied of his creation. After writing 24 Holmes stories in six years, Doyle yearned for \u201chigher writing\u201d and felt his special calling to be the historical novel. In December 1893, Doyle introduced into \u201cThe Final Problem\u201d the arch criminal Professor James Moriarty. In that last story, Holmes and the evil professor wrestle at a cliff\u2019s edge in Switzerland. Grasping each other, sleuth and villain plummet to their watery deaths at the foot of the Reichenbach Falls.<\/p>\n
With Holmes destroyed, Doyle felt he could turn his authorial eyes to the romantic landscapes of the Middle Ages. He longed to chronicle the clangor of medieval battles, the derring-do of brave knights, and the sighs of lovesick maidens.<\/p>\n
But the writer\u2019s tour back in time would not be that easily booked. Sherlock Holmes had taken on a life of his own, something larger than the will of his creator. The normally staid, stiff-upper-lipped British public was first bereaved. London stockbrokers went to work wearing black armbands in mourning for the loss of their heroic detective. Doyle\u2019s readers became outraged. Citizens poured out torrents of letters to editors complaining of Holmes\u2019s fate. One woman picketed Doyle\u2019s home with a sign branding him a murderer.<\/p>\n
The appeals of The Strand\u2019s publishers to Doyle\u2019s sensibilities and purse went unheeded. For the next eight years, Holmes lay dead at the bottom of the Swiss falls while Doyle branched out into historical fiction, science fiction, horror tales, and medical stories. But he wasn\u2019t very good at \u201chigher writing,\u201d and it didn\u2019t sell well.<\/p>\n
Finally, Doyle could resist the pressures from publisher and public no more. In 1903appeared \u201cThe Return of Sherlock Holmes,\u201d the series of 13 stories that brought back Doyle\u2019shero from his violent demise, his logical wonders to perform. Readers again queued up by thethousands to buy the monthly installments, and the author continued writing stories of hisdetective right into 1927. When, in 1930, Arthur Conan Doyle died at age 71, readers around the\u00a0world mourned his passing. Newspaper cartoons portraying a grieving Sherlock Holmes capturedthe public\u2019s sense of irreparable loss.<\/p>\n
Such is the power of mythic literature that the creation has outlived his creator. From all over the world letters and packages still come addressed to \u201cSherlock Holmes\u201d at 221B Baker Street, his fictional home. Well over 300 movies have been made about Holmes than about Dracula, Frankenstein, Robin Hood, and James Bond combined. Sherlock Holmes stories written by post-Doylean authors now vastly outnumber the 60 that Doyle produced. More than 400 Sherlockian societies pay homage to Sherlock Holmes in Great Britain, the U,S., Switzerland, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, and all around the globe.<\/p>\n
However many times the progenitor tried to finish off his hero, by murder or retirement or flat refusal to write any more adventures, the Great Detective lives, vigilant and deductive as ever, protecting us from the evils that lurk in the very heart of our so-called civilization. Sherlock Holmes has never died. Readers around the world simply won\u2019t let him.<\/p>\n
Please send your questions and comments about language to richardhlederer@gmail.com website: verbivore.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Next Saturday, Aug. 22, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the University of San Diego, KPBS will host…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[23,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-433838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-local-news","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}