At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was certainly no slacking of interest in Holmes among an ever-increasing public hungry for anything associated with Doyle's detective. Reprints of Doyle's tales competed with new books (including graphic novels), adaptations and expansions of the original stories, pastiches, parodies, and tributes. The film industry exploited the Holmes stories for interpretations that appealed to contemporary audiences; television reaped the benefits of viewers’ familiarity with the characters to create a number of popular and critically acclaimed new productions. A new journal, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, began publication in 2008 as an outlet for creative work modeled on Doyle's detective fiction. Mystery novelist P. D. James included a chapter on Holmes and G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown in her survey Talking about Detective Fiction (2009).

Numerous authors used the instant recognition that the name “Sherlock Holmes” engenders as a hook to attract potential readers to books that have little to do with Doyle's stories (or even with Holmes). For example, Sherlock Holmes in Babylon, and Other Essays (Anderson et al. 2004) teases readers into perusing a collection of essays on ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and post-Renaissance mathematics. Jorgen Nordenstrom's Evidence-Based Medicine: In Sherlock Holmes’ Footsteps (2007) contains little more than a paragraph on Doyle's detective in a book recommending procedural methods for new physicians in investigating illness and disease. André Didierjean and Fernand Gobert's article in the British Journal of Psychology employs the character of Holmes to demonstrate differences between experts and novices in problem-solving (2008).

Doyle's other fiction and nonfiction also began receiving greater attention from critics, particularly his science fiction. In their introduction to The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Reader (2002), Jeffrey and Valerie Meyers suggest (as Hesketh Pearson argued six decades earlier) that Doyle may not have been a deep thinker; but he was “a master of the detective story and the ripping yarn,” and “he showed in everything he wrote, whether serious or lighthearted, good humor and an almost boyish trust in life” (xxxii).

In the twenty-first century, the steady growth of critical commentary on Doyle's work begun in preceding decades poured out of academic and commercial presses. Critical commentary published during the first decade of the century is an entertaining potpourri of traditional readings and ones based on a number of new theoretical approaches and the ideologies that underpin many of these approaches.