ABSTRACT
Three Castles comes along with another long-continued—shall we say?—chronic complaint against Mr. Conan Doyle, that he does not give us a new series of Sherlock Holmes. Three Castles does not employ any arguments, nor do any of our correspondents who desire the same thing, which we have not already put before Mr. Conan Doyle. After all, the author is the best judge of what work he wants to do, and in any case he is the deciding factor in the matter. We hope that he will continue the series at some time, but when—or if ever—we cannot at present say. In the meantime we are publishing his “Sherlock Holmes,” both the Adventures and Memoirs, as well as The Sign of Four in book form at sixpence each.
(“Answers to Correspondents,” Tit-Bits [1 April 1899]: 15) Notwithstanding its date, this response to what “Three Castles” wrote to the editor of Tit-Bits and the Strand was no joke. Over five years after Arthur Conan Doyle had tried to kill off his immortal detective in the Strand for Christmas 1893, a steady stream of readers’ complaints had run through Tit-Bits. A more upscale periodical aspiring to the condition of a book, the Strand did not print correspondence, but the literary event so intimately associated with the monthly needed no publicity from other periodicals. It is part of the Strand’s lore that, in response, young City men wore mourning bands to work, Doyle received death threats, and the Strand lost 20,000 subscriptions. Few if any events in fiction before or since have excited such a response, which, remarkably, was elicited by a short story—a most unprepossessing genre for much of the foregoing century. While it would be ridiculous to suggest that the furor over Sherlock Holmes erupted because of public demand for short stories, the genre’s formal and commercial strictures arguably moved Doyle’s mythopoeia to its fullest expression. The resulting conventions were instrumental to the Strand’s populist manipulation and marketing of a theretofore neglected genre into a phenomenon of mass print.