engleski

'Worlding Detective Fiction: Early 20th Century Appropriations of Sherlock Holmes'

The year 1907 saw the appearance of ‘Young Widow’s Secret’, the first of the many non- Anglophone appropriations of Sherlock Holmes published by the Berlin-based Verlagshaus für Volksliteratur und Kunst as part of the series entitled Detektiv Sherlock Holmes und seine weltberühmten Abenteuer (Detective Sherlock Holmes and His World-famous Adventures). The series featured some two hundred and thirty booklets, each thirty-two pages in length. Published fortnightly with lurid images on the cover, they were written by anonymous hacks and passed off as Doyle’s own work. Matters were soon made more complicated due to the fact that Verlagshaus für Volksliteratur und Kunst sold the copyright to this series across Europe and that these new, sensational, and action-packed adventures of Sherlock Holmes were often published abroad by the same publishers and in the same format as translations of Doyle’s canonical works. This is evident when comparing the surviving Croatian translation titles held at the National and University Library in Zagreb. The stories were serialised and translated abroad until a copyright court case was filed by the Stuttgart-based publisher who owned the rights to the original stories. The ruling allowed the free use of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ as a character as long as it was left out of the series title, but it forbade the use of Dr Watson’s character as well as any reference to Doyle as author (cf. Ritzheimer 2016). Verlagshaus für Volksliteratur und Kunst continued publishing these new adventures until 1933 under the more veiled series title Aus dem Geheimakten des Welt-Detektivs (From the Secret Files of the World Detective) ; translations into Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, Portuguese, French, and Spanish also continued to be distributed, and kept on being periodically reprinted until very recently. With some unlikely and obviously sensational-sounding titles featuring, for example, a four-headed woman and Jack the Ripper, these stories presented a physically robust Holmes who solved crimes with the help of a young assistant called Harry Taxon. Recent approaches to the study of world literature systems, especially those based on big data analyses like Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), use the example of detective fiction to speculate about the dissemination and development of literary genres. In addition, they invariably posit London and Paris as the centres of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century literary production. By mapping the production, translation, and consumption of this particular pulp fiction series, this paper sets out to tests these theories. Furthermore, by analysing the relationship between Doyle’s Holmes and his non-Anglophone doppelgangers, it interprets the German-based pastiche as an appropriation of ‘brand Sherlock’ that furthers the worlding of a particular type of sensational detective fiction.

adaptation, appropriation, dissemination, Sherlock Holmes, translation, world literature

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