engleski

How Sherlock Holmes Caught Jack the Ripper, or, the Curious History of the Production, Translation, and Consumption of Sherlock Holmes Appropriations

The end of the Victorian era saw an unprecedented European-wide craze for detective stories thanks to widely available and affordable paperback editions. The demand for Sherlock Holmes stories in particular was such that it could not be met even by swiftly churned out translations. Enterprising publishers such as the Berlin-based Verlagshaus für Volksliteratur und Kunst hired hacks to write stories as part of the series Detektiv Sherlock Holmes und seine weltberühmten Abenteuer (Detective Sherlock Holmes and His World-famous Adventures), swiftly selling the copyright throughout Europe. Alongside translations of Doyle’s own fiction, translations of these new stories quickly went on sale in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Croatia, Portugal, France and Spain, until the publishers were forced to change the series title to Aus dem Geheimakten des Welt-Detektivs (From the Secret Files of the World Detective) for copyright reasons. With lurid covers and sensational plots, these stories, alongside Doyle’s originals, have managed to maintain their grip on the public imagination well into the twenty-first century. The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, to supplement the accepted presumption in world literature theory about the central role played by metropoles such as London and Paris in the dispersion of literary works across the European ‘narrative markets’ (Moretti 1998) by mapping the translation, dissemination, and consumption of this particular pulp fiction series. Secondly, focusing on one particular title in the series, ‘How they caught Jack the Ripper’ (1908), I analyse the long shadow cast by these pastiches on the contemporary appropriations and adaptations of Sherlock Holmes.

adaptation; afterlife; appropriation; Sherlock Holmes; translation; world literature

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