In a famous 1926 Punch cartoon, a very large figure of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is chained to a chair, head engulfed in the clouds, eyes closed on a face that displays his clear exasperation. The source of that distress is depicted beside the chair: a much smaller figure that readers of Punch and others around the world would have instantly recognized as Doyle's master sleuth, Sherlock Holmes (May 12, 1926). Little interpretation was necessary for Doyle's contemporaries, or for anyone in succeeding decades: as much as Doyle tried for the last three decades of his life to establish his reputation as writer of what he considered serious literature, he was to be chained forever to his fictional detective.

Since Edgar Allan Poe introduced C. August Dupin in 1841, thousands of detectives have entertained readers around the world. Among British sleuths, G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, and P. D. James's Adam Dalgleish have achieved cult status in some circles. American private eyes and police detectives such as Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Walter Moseley's Easy Rawlings, Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, and James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux are but a few of the many who have become “close friends” of millions of readers. But as David Cohen observed recently, “There is no Journal of Poirot Studies, while there are at least 40,000 books and papers on Holmes, including psychiatric literature” (2022, 28). To be more precise: currently there are two major journals devoted to Holmes studies, two publishers who focus almost exclusively on Holmes-related materials, and more than a hundred societies worldwide dedicated to a study of what devotees call “the Canon.” How Doyle's reputation has been affected by this overwhelming attention to a small segment of his prolific output is the subject of this study.

Doyle's Critical Reputation: An Overview

The dilemma in which Doyle found himself during his lifetime is the same one any twenty-first-century scholar faces in trying to assess Doyle's reputation nearly a hundred years after his death.