# Why did Sherlock Holmes become so popular? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 3, 2011, 12:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-sherlock-holmes-become-so-popular/584184 "2011-06-03T12:37:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Hodge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Hodge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hodge)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 1:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-sherlock-holmes-become-so-popular/584184/21 "2011-06-04T01:53:55Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Doyle hated Holmes. He didn’t want to do more stories. After the hit they made in The Strand, the editors were wild to have him back. He had been paid £25 for “A Study in Scarlet”. For the dozen stories starting with “Silver Blaze” he asked for and got £1,000 ($5,000). That was ten times the average middle class yearly income. The mania got so intense he felt he had to kill Holmes off in “The Final Problem.” > > People wanted more. The first Holmes parodies start showing up in 1896. The William Gillette play was 1899. Didn’t help. People were crazy for Holmes. > > That’s why the announcement of a novel, set before Holmes’ death, was met with such hysteria. The novel was the response to Holmes’ already enormous popularity, not the cause of it. Just to elaborate on this, and I’m sure **Exapno** will correct me if I’m wrong but, IIRC, “Hound” was originally conceived as a non-Holmes story. Doyle only re-worked it for Sherlock when he reluctantly came to the conclusion that Holmes was a ideally suited for the story.. I think you can see evidence of this in the long stretches of Holmes’ absence where he sent Watson up to the Baskerville estate in his stead. Of course, this is based on vague recollection on my part since I haven’t read the story in over 20 years but if I have it right it’s a pretty good indicator that Doyle had grown weary of the character. Of course, after “Hound’s” stunning success I think he just threw up his hands and gave the public what it wanted. The lorry-loads of money probably helped eased the pain of being stuck with Holmes. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-sherlock-holmes-become-so-popular/584184/22 "2011-06-04T03:48:01Z")
I’m guessing that what you’re thinking of is from John Dickson Carr’s bio of Doyle. > [@](#): > > Originally, it had never entered Conan Doyle head to use Sherlock Holmes when he planned the story in Cromer. But, as he began to solidify details shortly after, it became clear that some master-of-destinies must preside over it. “So I thought to myself,” he told Hodder Williams, “why should I invent a character when I had him already in the form of Holmes?” The time span involved is very short. He stayed only four days at Cromer, apparently a kind of spa, in March 1901. He created a sketch of the plot with Fletcher Robinson, a journalist who told him folk-tales from Dartmoor. The two were actively at work by April 2. The story is the old switcheroo, of The King of the Foxes, which Doyle published in 1898. It’s not at all surprising that Doyle might plot a non-Holmes story, but it sure looks like that phase didn’t last past the earliest notion. This doesn’t present him as reluctant, either. There’s more of a sense that he had found a way to feed the leeches and make him some money without reviving Holmes. But every account has it slightly different. In the introduction by David Stuart Davies to Doyle’s autobiography, the word “reluctant” is used. He and Robinson were originally planning on co-authoring, but Robinson started getting cut out when Doyle realized he needed a detective to unravel the plot. Holmes. “Reluctantly Conan Doyle decided to bring Sherlock Holmes back for one last case…” Every time Doyle mentioned Robinson after that, he relegated him to a smaller part. From both I get the feeling that any hope of it not being a Holmes book didn’t make it past the first week of talking about it. But both are fairly murky about the details. ---
**Author:** ![WotNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e19b73/32.png) [@WotNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WotNot)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 9:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-sherlock-holmes-become-so-popular/584184/23 "2011-06-04T09:36:04Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar, by Doyle’s brother-in-law, had about 30 short stories and almost a dozen novels. I think you’re confusing your gentleman thieves a little there, **Exapno** , old chap. As I’m sure you know, Doyle’s brother-in-law, E W Hornung, wrote about A J Raffles. The somewhat similar Arsène Lupin was created by Maurice Leblanc. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 1:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-sherlock-holmes-become-so-popular/584184/24 "2011-06-04T13:15:14Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > You’re onto something, but ultimately, I doubt more Max Carrados stories would have turned him into a phenomenon like Holmes. Carrados never generated the popularity that Holmes did, and the gimmick was clever, but somewhat limiting. I always liked how Agatha Christie took it one step further in BLINDMAN’S BLUFF. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-sherlock-holmes-become-so-popular/584184/25 "2011-06-05T18:10:08Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > ETA: Perry Mason is today? Anyway, the best earlier example is Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. At one time he had the seven best-selling paperbacks ever. They may have outsold the 80 Mason novels combined, and those were almost all million-selling paperbacks. Uh oh! My age is showing again. Wasn’t 20 years ago just yesterday? Oh well. I was commenting on the longevity of the Perry Mason popularity, which includes the TV series and movies, and fueled the continuing popularity of the books. At this point I’ll thread fart a little and point out that Sherlock Holmes would have been a terrible detective in real life. The influence of the character has actually created injustice in the real world by popularizing notions like: > [@Sherlock Holmes](#): > > How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? In reality, eliminating the impossible rarely reduces a problem to one alternative, and rarely is it possible to even know all possibilities. You don’t find many locked room mysteries in real life. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-sherlock-holmes-become-so-popular/584184/26 "2011-06-05T21:51:51Z")
> [@WotNot](#): > > I think you’re confusing your gentleman thieves a little there, **Exapno** , old chap. > > As I’m sure you know, Doyle’s brother-in-law, E W Hornung, wrote about A J Raffles. The somewhat similar Arsène Lupin was created by Maurice Leblanc. Curses, foiled. For the first time. 🙂 How can we live in a world in which several different series of gentleman burglars aren’t the norm? (Others include The Saint, and The Toff, and supertypes like The Shadow and Batman were offshoots.) Don’t we want rich people to be ripped off by their weekend guests? To atone, the weird history. Hornung created Raffles, with his subWasonian sidekick Bunny, in 1898. Yes, he was the one who married Doyle’s sister. They hung around together and he wanted to be a writer just like Artie, so much that he deliberately aped Holmes, turning him inside-out. He did three collections of short stories and a novel. A half dozen films were made and then he moved to television, but never got any popularity in the U.S. We don’t go for men named Bunny. Leblanc came later, starting in 1905, but he was far more interesting and successful. The one to read is Arsene Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes, a collection where Lupin battles the transparently renamed Holmes. So both have a direct Holmes connection, which is probably why my aging brain conflated, them. Lupin is mostly forgotten today, but you could make a good case that he was second only to Holmes in popularity. You know a character is instantly identifiable when parodies are written. Holmes parodies number in the hundreds. Lupin parodies go back to the early part of the 20th century and were probably second in number only to Holmes. He was later overtaken by hardboiled parodies but those are mostly generic rather than specifically about a character. And there are bunches of films from half a dozen countries. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-sherlock-holmes-become-so-popular/584184/27 "2011-06-05T22:22:29Z")
I can’t speak to the movies and other media, but I love the Holmes short stories and novels. Both the main and supporting characters are very well drawn, they are reliably engrossing, and they are frequently (and deliberately) funny as hell. They deserve their long popularity. ---
**Author:** ![E-Sabbath](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e19adc/32.png) [@E-Sabbath](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-Sabbath)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2011, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-sherlock-holmes-become-so-popular/584184/28 "2011-06-06T12:18:43Z")
Lupin is not forgotten today. He still lives… or his grandson does. [![]( " - YouTube") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyUM4--E3dA) Lupin III is one of the more popular and long-running japanese cartoon characters. > **[Lupin the Third](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupin_III)** > > Lupin III (Japanese: ルパン三世, Hepburn: Rupan Sansei), also written as Lupin the Third, Lupin the 3rd, or Lupin the IIIrd, is a Japanese media franchise created by Monkey Punch in 1967. The series follows the endeavors of master thief Lupin III, grandson of gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, joined by his criminal gang. The original Lupin III manga began in Weekly Manga Action on August 10, 1967. The series' success spawned a media franchise that includes numerous manga, seven animated television se... He’s been around since '67, and is still having adventures today. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-sherlock-holmes-become-so-popular/584184.md?page=1)