SHERLOCKIAN APOCRYPHA : From Jack the Ripper to Fu Manchu.

Carole Nelson Douglas's latest mystery novel, Chapel Noir, involves a Rothschild baron, Jack the Ripper, a tarot-telling gypsy, Buffalo Bill, and a warren of catacombs beneath the Eiffel Tower. Quotes from Verlaine and Shakespeare feature among the chapter epigraphs, and the concluding bibliography cites Krafft-Ebing and Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris. But for a small subset of detective-story addicts, the book's point of salient interest is its adherence to an obscure literary category: the Sherlock Holmes pastiche. Several times over the course of 475 pages, the immortal sleuth stalks into the narrative and matches wits with the cigar-smoking protagonist, Irene Adler--a character Douglas has borrowed from Arthur Conan Doyle's 1891 story, "A Scandal in Bohemia."

When she launched her Irene Adler series in 1990 with Goodnight, Mr. Holmes, Douglas joined the ranks of writers, filmmakers, and playwrights who have indulged in Holmes apocrypha--a lineage that includes Arthur's son, Adrian Conan Doyle, who cobbled together The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, in collaboration with the writer John Dickson Carr, in the early 1950s. Carr and Doyle fils harbored modest ambitions: generating stories for the episodes tantalizingly referred to, but never described, in the oeuvre of Doyle pere--the "Camberwell poisoning case" that Watson alludes to in the story titled "The Five Orange Pips," for example. Since The Exploits, dozens of artists have haunted the terrain around 221B Baker Street, often attracting little interest outside the circles of hard-core Sherlockians. One notable exception is Nicholas Meyer's 1974 bestseller The Seven-Percent Solution, in which Sigmund Freud cures Holmes's cocaine addiction; in 1976 the book spawned a movie that featured Alan Arkin, Vanessa Redgrave, and Laurence Olivier. Other cinematic contributions to the Holmes legend--for example, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), which transported its eponymous hero to the World War II era--have also reached a wide audience.

But the genre extends far beyond Meyer and the movies, as I can attest, having built up a substantial collection of Holmes pastiches, in one of my more eccentric hobbies. Tired of rereading The Hound of the Baskervilles? Your options range in style and scope from Jo Soares's A Samba for Sherlock, set in 1886 Rio de Janeiro, to Frank Thomas's Sherlock Holmes and the Sacred Sword, which transports the detective to Egypt's Valley of the Kings; from the science fiction anthology Sherlock Holmes in Orbit to Sena Jeter Naslund's Sherlock in Love, weighed down by literary aspirations, to Resurrected Holmes, whose contributors imagine Holmes tales as penned by Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, and P. G. Wodehouse. Among the odder ersatz Doyles on my shelf are Randall Collins's The Case of the Philosophers' Ring, which throws Holmes together with Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and other Bloomsbury-type highbrows ("Observe, Watson...It may be that there are persons who do not wish Wittgenstein's ideas to be published at all...") and Sherlock Holmes, Bridge Detective, by George Gooden and Frank Thomas ("Watson, my mind has been titillated by that spade slam skurry bid...").

Blame it all on the marketplace. The appetite for Holmes stories has always been insatiable, as Arthur Conan Doyle discovered when an outraged public forced him to revive the character after pitching him over the Reichenbach Falls in the 1893 story "The Final Problem." The man with the deerstalker is more reassuring than most detectives, for he represents pure rationality, perpetually unswayed by sexual desire and immune to the petty curiosities and solipsism that plague the rest of us--a fact demonstrated in the passage in Doyle's "A Study in Scarlet" that relates the sleuth's indifference to the fact that the earth revolves around the sun. And yet, with his passion for music and loyalty to Watson, he is no mere pedant but a "romantic personality possessed by the scientific spirit," in Edmund Wilson's words. To call him a role model is an understatement; the writer and minister Stephen Kendrick hardly goes too far when he argues, in Holy Clues: The Gospel according to Sherlock Holmes, that Holmes's "devotion to the truth...elevates him to being a new kind of monk who offers his life for others."

So it's not surprising that writers of pastiches--works that have been almost wholly ignored by the legions of Holmes-fixated critics--have wistfully imagined Baker Street's eminence gris solving the great crimes of history. In addition to Carole Nelson Douglas, the mystery writer Michael Dibdin and the broadcast journalist Edward B. Hanna have permitted the detective to track down Jack the Ripper.

Other puzzles of yesteryear deciphered by the Victorian investigator include the Dreyfus affair, the 1907 theft of the Irish crown jewels, the alleged bigamy of King George V, an 1880 rumor about the death of Rutherford B. Hayes, and the sinking of the Titanic. Were time more elastic, one can imagine how it would soothe the U.S. national psyche to have Moriarty's arch-enemy get to the bottom of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the O.J. Simpson case, and just who really won the presidential election of 2000.

In many cases, though, Doyle imitators have introduced fictional mysteries, but peopled them with actual historical personages. Meyer, for example, followed up The Seven-Percent Solution with the less successful The West End Horror, whose characters include Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, and George Bernard Shaw. And one highlight of my pastiche collection is Alexis Lecaye's Einstein et Sherlock Holmes, which to my knowledge has never been translated into English. In an essay with the intimidating title "The Representation of Victorian England in the Contemporary Detective Novel," the academic Anthony Giffone argues that whodunit authors like Meyer (and, he might have added, Caleb Carr) use historical figures to "give a pop-culture genre a serious veneer, a sense of not being a mere entertainment."

But in the case of Sherlockian apocrypha, I would argue, a different game is afoot. The Case of the Appropriated Historical Figure parallels the Case of the Appropriated Fictional Figure--a phenomenon almost equally prevalent in the pastiches. In the volumes in my collection, Holmes battles Dracula, solves Dickens's Mystery of Edwin Drood, hobnobs with Hercule Poirot, Father Brown, and Porfiry Petrovitch (from Crime and Punishment), meets the Phantom of the Opera, and (my favorite) crosses wits with Fu Manchu. The crucial point here is not that the borrowed material redeems the mystery, but that in some sense the mystery redeems the borrowed material. To place the odds and ends of history and literature within the purview of Sherlock Holmes, the great rationalist and seeker after truth, is to rescue them from confusion and meaninglessness, to fashion a comforting continuity.

It has become a truism to observe that culture is becoming fragmented--that ever-multiplying, demographically targeted TV channels and custom-tailored Internet news services are chipping away at group identity and shared values. By taking Sherlock Holmes in hand again and again, Carole Nelson Douglas & Co. seem to express a yearning for reality's glut of narratives to be folded into a single narrative with a single, comforting significance--Sherlock Holmes solves life. When you get right down to it, it's not unlike the wish that Tennyson broached in In Memoriam, a poem that--like early detective novels--offered a response to Darwinism and other faith-shaking scientific advances: "O, yet we trust that somehow good / Will be the final goal of ill...That nothing walks with aimless feet; / That not one life shall be destroyed, / Or cast as rubbish to the void, / When God hath made the pile complete."