Crafting a Sherlock Holmes Pastiche

Why do you not write them yourself? – Crafting a Sherlock Holmes pastiche

Lyndsay Faye, BSI, ASH, is an internationally best-selling author, an active Sherlockian and a member of the Baker Street Babes. Her collection of Sherlockian pastiches, The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, was released in March 2017. (Editor’s note: See review of this book on page 35)

et’s commence by dispensing with any pretences of lofty art or gatekeeper mentalities here: we write Sherlock Holmes pastiches and Sherlock Holmes fanfiction because we are huge nerds, nerds driven to do so with an overwhelming compunction. I must sit down at once and write a short story about the Giant Rat of Sumatra, we think. But featuring H. G. Wells! And we can hardly contain ourselves until it is finished. This is a grand and a glorious thing, because it places us on a level playing field—if you’re writing a dark and stirring literary account of Sherlock Holmes’s troubled childhood to be published by a major publishing house, well and good; and if you are writing a “crack fic” about BBC Sherlock and John being transported to the bridge of the Federation Starship Enterprise, I applaud you. So bear in mind that this little craft discussion is based squarely in the world for which I myself am best known: writing a traditional canonical pastiche, usually from the point of view of Dr. John Watson. Fifteen of my own stories were recently published in collection so I’ve certainly had some practice. With that in mind, what follows are what I personally consider to be important considerations when penning a work of this type. And the very best of luck to anyone embarking on such a venture, because it means I’ll have more pastiches to read! Victorian language is, if you’ll pardon me, a sticky wicket. The reason it’s difficult for us to emulate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s elegant yet vivid prose isn’t merely because he was a genre fiction genius with a canny knack for style and economy of metaphor—that would be hard enough. We have to imagine ourselves in a time period during which a very different syntax was employed, and the temptation is to write in such a complex manner that Charles Dickens himself would raise his eyebrows and whistle. Avoid this at all costs! Yes, some of Doyle’s sentences are long and complex and even verging on the poetic, but he wrote in what was—at the time—everyday vernacular. Sherlock Holmes doesn’t always

20 Canadian Holmes ¬ Summer 2017