ABSTRACT
The Sherlock Holmes character first appeared in “A Study in Scarlet” in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887. Serialized stories in The Strand Magazine from 1891 onwards gave the detective figure widespread popularity. By the 1920s, he had spawned a transmedia universe, consisting of adaptations (films, dramas, literary parodies) and journalistic paratexts; these originated in the UK and other European countries as well as in the US. Arthur Conan Doyle did relatively little to assert his intellectual property rights over adaptations, but paratexts regularly lauded him as the creator of the Great Detective. This chapter focuses on the early years of Sherlock Holmes. First, it traces the development of the character from the initial textual instantiations to the international transmedia universe of the early twentieth century. Textual analysis employed here is based on a character template consisting of demographics, psychological traits, habitual behaviors, speech patterns, physical appearance, relationships with secondary characters and geographical and temporal setting. Second, it explores the role of copyright and authorial authority. Third, it contrasts the long nineteenth-century character template with that of the early twenty-first century. It argues that these distinctions arise from the very different industrial underpinnings of the nineteenth- and twenty-first centuries’ transmedia universes.
