Sherlock's World

Fan Fiction and the Reimagining of BBC's Sherlock

Ann K. McClellan

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781609386177
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sherlock Holmes remains more popular than ever some 130 years after the detective first appeared in print. These days, the iconic character's staying power is due in large part to the success of the recent BBC series Sherlock, which brings the famous sleuth into the twenty-first century.

One of the most-watched television series in BBC history, Sherlock is set in contemporary London, where thirtysomething Sherlock and John (no longer fussy old Holmes and Watson), alongside New Scotland Yard, solve crimes with the help of smartphones, texting, online forums, and the internet. In their modernization of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's nineteenth-century world, Sherlock creators Stephen Moffatt and Mark Gatiss make London as much a character of their show as the actors themselves. The highly stylized series has inspired an impassioned fan community in Britain, the U.S., and beyond. Fans create and share their writings, which reimagine the characters in even more dramatic ways than the series can.

Interweaving fan fiction studies, world-building, and genre studies, Ann McClellan examines the hit series and the fan fiction it inspires. Using Sherlock to trace the changing face of fan fiction studies, McClellan's book explores how far fans are willing to go to change the Sherlockian canon while still reinforcing its power and status as the source text. What makes Sherlock fanfic Sherlockian? How does it stay within the canon even while engaging in the wildest reimaginings? Sherlock's World explores the boundaries between canon, genre, character, and reality through the lenses of fan fiction and world-building. This book promises to be a valuable resource for fan studies scholars, those who write fan fiction, and Sherlock fans alike.

CHAPTER ONE

TRANSMEDIA SHERLOCK

Exclusive and Inclusive World Building

We begin by exploring the main characteristics of Sherlock’s world and how the producers extrapolate the television show’s primary elements into corporate transmedial world building practices and merchandising. Described as creating a coherent, unified narrative across multiple media platforms, transmedia storytelling has become a dominant mode of programming for media producers over the past several years. Such texts do not merely adapt a primary source into new formats; rather, they offer new perspectives into the characters and the complex world of the show—what scholar Matt Hills has labeled its hyper-diegesis (Evans 30; Hills, Fan Culture 137). Many critics emphasize transmedia’s interactivity (that is, its inclusivity) as the primary way in which these stories engage audiences; however, the creators must first establish the world’s primary canonical elements before audiences can engage with and potentially change or add to the fictional world. Building off the show’s canon, Sherlock’s producers, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, incorporate both exclusive and inclusive models of corporate transmedia storytelling to extend the show’s hyper-diegesis. In addition to merchandising and tie-in novels, the BBC’s character websites provide the showrunners with a space in which to adapt additional Arthur Conan Doyle stories, but the websites also create a static window through which viewers can read about John and Sherlock’s further adventures beyond the show’s original programming. Viewers can go to John’s blog, but they cannot interact with it; its online verisimilitude creates the illusion of interactivity, but users are excluded from actively engaging with the closed world portrayed on the website. In Sherlock: The Network, however, users are directly addressed by Sherlock, John, and Mycroft through video, audio files, and text messaging that directly impact the user’s navigation and strategization within the game. By making the user a member of Sherlock’s famed “homeless network,” the audience is virtually taken inside Sherlock’s world as a participant and co-creator, thus establishing an additional sense of connection with the show, its characters, and its storylines. By combining these seemingly dichotomous forms of transmedia storytelling, the show is able to create the simultaneous impression that Sherlock’s world is both a closed, cohesive unit and one open to, and part of, the viewer’s real world.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Nineteenth-Century Sherlockian World

Before we can begin analyzing fans’ reactions to and participation within a transmedial world, we first need to study the ur-actualization of the world’s core elements, which define its worldness (Klastrup and Tosca 4).¹ Determining Sherlock’s ur-text is tricky, however, since there have been hundreds of textual, televisual, film, and other media portrayals of the character ever since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s introduction of Sherlock Holmes in 1887. Showrunners Moffat and Gatiss have spoken extensively about the many different adaptations they’ve appropriated for their own version (Digital Spy); however, most versions can be traced back to Doyle’s original incarnation of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1887). Doyle established many of the most commonly recognized Sherlockian world elements in his original fifty-six short stories and four novellas, including foggy London city streets, the 221b Baker Street flat, and many of the original characters from the stories (Holmes, Watson, Mycroft, Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, and so on). Doyle’s nineteenth-century London is instantly recognizable and has been reproduced by scores of fiction writers, dramatists, scriptwriters, and fans over the succeeding years, beginning as early as 1892, and the realism of Doyle’s representation of Victorian London is perhaps the reason why so many adaptations have focused so heavily on the tales’ setting and milieu.² Because Doyle’s 221b Baker Street was so full of minute and convincing details (Holmes’s Persian slipper filled with tobacco, the jackknife-speared correspondence on the mantel, the unframed portrait of Henry Ward Beecher), early fans believed the fictional place to be real, and many planned trips to visit the home of the famous detective. Even though the 221b Baker Street address did not become a reality until 1930, fans still sent hundreds of letters, both to Doyle at his home, and later to the Abbey National Bank housed in Holmes’s canonical address.³ The Abbey National Bank received so many letters addressed to Holmes over the years that they had to hire a full-time secretary to respond to each one. Thousands of fans to this day make the pilgrimage to Holmes’s offices on Baker Street, even though the house did not actually exist when Doyle created the character.

This blurring between the fictional place described in Doyle’s stories and the real location of 221b Baker Street in the actual world highlight the symbolic ways place and space work within transmedia storytelling. Michel de Certeau defines places as “locations of stability” while spaces are “mobile” (117). In this formulation, the concrete physical location of 221b Baker Street and its interior objects becomes a place; the flat is a destination and home for specific elements within the Sherlockian world. In contrast, spaces imply geographic topographies that must be traversed, like the vast network of London city streets. We (imaginatively) travel through England’s vast spaces in the Sherlock Holmes stories, from the Ascot races in “The Adventures of the Silver Blaze” to the desolate fields of Dartmoor in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Detailed descriptions of places and spaces in fiction help create what Roland Barthes has termed “the reality effect”: concrete details fix an atmosphere and remind the reader of the larger world of the plot (Ryan, Narrative 130). The fictional world, then, acts as a simulation of the actual world until the fiction risks rewriting the actual world out of existence (Polasek 195–96).⁴

Doyle’s characterization of Sherlock Holmes, in particular, has also played a dominant role in establishing the ur-text for contemporary Sherlock Holmes adaptations such as the BBC version. Holmes is described as tall, thin, with dark hair, recessed gray eyes, and a hawk-like nose (Doyle, in A Study in Scarlet). Readers are given copious details of his physical mannerisms (his thinking pose in Doyle’s “Red-Headed League”) and of his particular speech patterns and common phrases (“The game is afoot,” in Doyle’s “Abbey Grange,” or “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” in The Sign of the Four). Interestingly, three of Holmes’s most famous characteristics—his deerstalker hat, Inverness cape, and meerschaum pipe—were not included in the original world created by Doyle but rather were added to the canon by outside artists and actors (Sidney Paget, Basil Rathbone, and William Gillette, respectively). At the same time that audiences believe Holmes is an instantly recognizable character, Doyle also left significant gaps in his character’s history. We don’t know where Sherlock Holmes was born and raised, other than that he is descended from “a long line of Sussex squires” (Doyle, “The Musgrave Ritual”; “The Greek Interpreter”) and that he is distantly related to the French painter Vernet (Doyle, “The Greek Interpreter”). We know of his brother, Mycroft, but we know nothing else of his family or personal history. We don’t know which university he attended (if at all) or how he came up with his deductive reasoning technique. We know how he came to be a consulting detective (Doyle, “The Gloria Scott”) but nothing about his life history after 1904, which is when Watson tells us Holmes retired to Sussex to keep bees. Yet even with all of these gaps—or, perhaps, because of them—Sherlock Holmes’s London remains one of the most famous and well-known fictional worlds in literary history. From its very inception, Sherlock Holmes’s world was open to audience interpretation and appropriation.

Sherlock’s World

In their modernization of Doyle’s nineteenth-century world, Sherlock creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss similarly invoke London as the central place in their contemporary adaptation. As previously explained, fictional worlds must be massive yet detailed, implying both expansiveness and specificity. Audiences must be able to see, in minute detail, all of the specific elements in Sherlock Holmes’s flat as clearly as they can imagine the larger London world that lies outside his doors. London and Sherlock’s 221b Baker Street flat are “‘invested with agency’” to the extent that they can be seen as characters in the same vein as Sherlock and John (Gregoriou 49–50).⁵ The city becomes part of a larger framework that shapes the cultural values and overall milieu of the show and its characters, and it seeps into every aspect of the world and its extensions. For instance, even though the show was filmed in Cardiff and on set, Sherlock’s opening credits include scenes and stills from the season’s episodes, but they also include views of key London landmarks from the original Doyle canon, such as Piccadilly Circus, home of the Criterion Bar, where John Watson met his former colleague, Mike Stamford, after his return from the second Afghan War in A Study in Scarlet; Sherlock adapts this meeting into a Criterion coffee shop meeting with Stamford in “A Study in Pink.” The show repeatedly features exterior and interior shots from St. Bartholomew’s hospital, where Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are first introduced in A Study in Scarlet in 1887; Sherlock adds multiple layers to the symbolic role of this spot by repeating the original Study in Scarlet meeting in “A Study in Pink” (season one, episode one, or S1E1) and also by making it the site of Sherlock’s alleged suicide at the end of “The Reichenbach Fall” (S2E3). In their appropriation of several important Doyle sites, Sherlock reinscribes these spaces with new layers of meaning and significance, particularly for those fans familiar with the original stories.

In addition to using setting to establish canonical antecedents with the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock also highlights several iconic London landmarks. The first season’s credits display elements of London’s famous skyline, including the London Eye Ferris wheel, Piccadilly Circus, Big Ben, the river Thames, and the Gherkin financial building; the second season strays farther afield and includes shots from Dartmoor and even Sherlock’s 221b door, thus ensuring that audiences know which London world they are about to experience. Other important landmarks play significant roles in different episodes. For instance, a vibrant aerial shot of London’s Buckingham Palace appears in the first half of “A Scandal in Belgravia” (S2E1) when John is being helicoptered in to meet Sherlock and Mycroft over the royal photo scandal with Irene Adler. The Tower of London is featured in “The Reichenbach Fall” (S2E3) as the site of Jim Moriarty’s burglary of the Crown Jewels and his subsequent arrest by New Scotland Yard. Each of these locations helps associate the plotlines of the specific episode with actual geographical locations in the city of London. They work to remind viewers that they are vicariously taking part in a fictional world grounded in actual world locales. These iconic sites serve to reassure audiences of the authenticity of Sherlock’s world—especially important since the show was primarily filmed in Cardiff and on set. Sherlock’s London thus is both manufactured, through stock media images like the aerial shot of Buckingham Palace, and visitable, since fans can physically travel to the material sites showcased in the opening credits and key episodes.

In addition to featuring significant London landmarks and important canonical sites for the original stories, Sherlock also creates its own canonical settings. For example, a few key scenes in “The Blind Banker” were filmed in London’s Chinatown and in a graffiti-covered skate park on the south bank of the Thames, both of which have become popular sites for fan tourism. Cinematic tourism brings fans of cult television shows, movies, and books to now sacred filming sites. Much like Doyle’s anecdote of the French schoolboys who wanted to visit Sherlock Holmes’s home in the early twentieth century, contemporary fans scope out filming sites for cult TV shows such as Sherlock and Doctor Who and films such as Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings series, visits that serve to legitimate fans’ investment in the cult text and to “unmediate and authenticate” the realities created by the shows (Hills, Fan Culture 150–51).⁶ These cult geographies become sacred sites of pilgrimage and performance for fans because they support their fantasies of “entering into the cult text, as well as [allow] the ‘text’ to leak out into spatial and cultural practices via fans’ creative transpositions and ‘genres of self’” (Hills, Fan Culture 150–51). Such activities are evidenced by the sheer number of international fans who visit 221b Baker Street each year, the home of the Sherlock Holmes Museum, as well as the number of popular walking tours now operating in London that trace Sherlock filming locations. Sherlock fans see a visit to Speedy’s Café on North Gower Street, a Sherlock filming location, as a rite of passage, and many seek to restage Sherlock’s death at St. Bart’s hospital in “The Reichenbach Fall.” Iconic London locations such as Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly Circus, Big Ben, and others combine to build the “vast and detailed narrative space” necessary for Sherlock’s world, and they have become fetishized in the Sherlock fan world by fans seeking to experience that world more fully (Hills, Fan Culture 137).

Populating Sherlock’s world are the show’s main characters, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, respectively. Their characterizations, mannerisms, catchphrases, and physical characteristics have all become essential elements of the Sherlock brand on the BBC and PBS. The actors are essential to the look and sound of the show, and their centrality carries over to Sherlock fanfiction, helping to differentiate it from fanfiction on Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson iterations featuring Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law, Johnny Lee Miller/Lucy Liu, or any number of others. Classic Hollywood films frequently assign specific tics, tags, and characteristics to individual characters so that they become immediately identifiable to audiences:

Their traits must be affirmed in speech and physical behavior, the observable projections of personality. . . . Even a simple physical reaction—a gesture, an expression, a widening of the eyes, constructs character psychology in accordance with other information. . . . Hollywood cinema reinforces the individuality and consistency of each character by means of recurrent motifs. A character will be tagged with a detail of speech or behavior that defines a major trait. (Bordwell 15)

In Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch, with his tall figure, striking eyes, dark curls, and prominent cheekbones, contrasts sharply with Martin Freeman, with his ashy blonde hair, muscular short stature, and pug nose: descriptions and depictions of these physical characteristics appear again and again in fanfiction and fan art. Each actor also brings a distinctive physicality to his character. Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is frequently seen perched on the back of a chair, hands pressed together under his chin in the classic “thinking pose” of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock. Cumberbatch also frequently ruffles his own curly locks and pops the collar of his signature Belstaff coat. Freeman as Watson often licks his lips, and he has a left-hand tremor, indicated by the character’s frequent clenching of his left fist in times of anger or frustration.

Bordwell further notes that characters are also identified by a specific “detail of speech” that “defines a major trait” (Bordwell 15). In addition to the character’s costumes, mannerisms, and physical appearance, Sherlock’s characters use specific catchphrases or ways of speaking that differentiate them from other members of the cast. Sherlock often tells his colleagues, for example, that certain clues or deductions are “obvious” for those who pay attention to the details. Sherlock’s line “The game is on” from “A Study in Pink” is a modernized homage to the Doyle Sherlock’s exclamation “The game is afoot” (“The Abbey Grange”), and it becomes a drunken joke in “The Sign of Three” (S3E2), when Sherlock can’t remember the ending of his own catchphrase and John has to supply the missing word (“The game is . . . you know”). Other lines, used once in the episodes, get repeated over and over again in fanfiction, like Sherlock’s comment to Anderson in “A Study in Pink” (S1E1), “You lower the IQ of t...