Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is a mainstay in classrooms, in scholarship, and in popular culture, but his work and its thriving afterlives rarely get the sustained attention they deserve in critical discourse. This is both because Conan Doyle primarily wrote genre fiction and because his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes, tends to crowd the author out of the conversation. Nevertheless, Conan Doyle is one of Scotland’s most successful authors, ranking with Burns, Scott, and Stevenson. There has been a recent effort in and outside academia to reclaim Conan Doyle’s reputation. This includes the Edinburgh Conan Doyle Project: Edinburgh UP’s new critical editions of Conan Doyle’s fiction and non-fiction; the formation of an international literary society dedicated to Conan Doyle’s life and work; and the launch of a new academic journal, The Conan Doyle Review, to publish interdisciplinary scholarship on Conan Doyle’s hundreds of stories, poems and essays as well as his active contributions to the culture of turn-of-the-century Britain in the realms of criminal justice, public policy, and sporting life.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s output sustains full conferences, which testify to the broad scholarly interest in his work. The Edinburgh Conan Doyle Project sponsored “Conan Doyle in Edinburgh” in September 2020 and will sponsor “Conan Doyle and Storytelling” in December 2021. The Arthur Conan Doyle Society will hold its first conference in London in 2023.

This panel focuses narrowly on Conan Doyle’s legacy through adapted works and participatory culture. Scholars of Scottish literature, of Victorian studies, of film, television, and adaptation studies, and of fan studies, have shown an interest in this topic. The panel begins with Taylor Tomko’s paper, “Spiritualist Adaptations: The Cross-Correspondences and Reimaging Sherlock Holmes.” Tomko offers an original theoretical model for engaging a central concern of adaptation studies—literary authority—by framing adaptations of Sherlock Holmes in terms of Conan Doyle’s own interest in automatic writing. Tomko argues that the fragmentary nature and multiplicity of texts in cross-correspondences are mirrored in the continual revival of Sherlock Holmes in film, television, and literary adaptations. Tomko thus seeks to resituate the disputed place of Conan Doyle’s authority over adaptations of his works.

This question of authority to reimagine texts remains central to the panel throughout. Nathan Murray and Dana Gavin speak to adaptation and fan practice, investigating how such works and practices are delineated by creators and consumers as authoritative, (in)authentic, and (un)real. In “‘Back to unreality’: The Sherlock Holmes Society of London, Fictional Re-enactment and Ontological Inversion,” Murray explores a mid-twentieth-century example of participatory culture involving an organized fan re-enactment of a fictional event from the Sherlock Holmes stories “The Final Problem” (1893) and “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903). Murray uses archival film, reports from attendees, and press reports to complicate the distinction between the real and the unreal, arguing that the event offered “a heretofore unexperienced reality accessible only within fiction.” He also explores how this engagement with Conan Doyle’s legacy helped spark a larger trend in participatory culture toward roleplaying and re-enactments of fictional events. Following Murray’s discussion of a mid-century example of adapting Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, Dana Gavin analyzes a contemporary example. In “‘[A] network of points’: I Am Lost Without My Boswell as Authentic Sherlockian Reconstruction,” Gavin argues that fan-generated installment adaptations of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures are the heir to Conan Doyle’s literary authority, as the fan-created Boswell audio dramas echo the “assemblage spirit” of Conan Doyle’s own nineteenth-century serialized publication practice.

The panel concludes by exploring how Conan Doyle’s literary authority can be usurped to serve a political agenda. Olga Mesropova analyzes this politicization in Russian television adaptations of Sherlock Holmes in “From London to St. Petersburg: Domesticating Sherlock Holmes in Recent Russian Serialized Television.” Mesropova’s paper juxtaposes two recent series, Sherlock (2013) and Sherlock in Russia (2020), to discuss how these distinctly different period dramas embody “Putin-era patriotic rewritings of Russian imperial history.” Mesropova brings the panel’s larger conversation about literary authority and textual authenticity full circle, as she argues for viewing the legacy of Conan Doyle not through his literary authority, but rather through defiance of that authority as means to build national identities beyond his native Britain.

The strong thematic relationship between the papers on this panel balances original insights into Conan Doyle’s legacy with larger questions about the scope of that legacy. The 15-minute Q&A period will be facilitated by the panel’s presider, Ashley D. Polasek, a scholar of Conan Doyle’s stage and screen afterlives and the editor-in-chief of The Conan Doyle Review.