When Doctor Who returned in 2005 and turned out to be a tremendous success, Russell T Davies suggested that the series had moved from being an enclosed phenomenon such as Blakes 7 or Quatermass to being an eternal mythology such as Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes. The implication of this suggestion is that Davies sees Doctor Who as, effectively, an immortal fictional text, a series that has demonstrated that it can come back, that has longevity. The best way of understanding what the state of Doctor Who might be at the end of the next fifty years may be to consider the state of the Sherlock Holmes mythology.

The releases of Guy Ritchie’s movie in 2009 and Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s TV series in 2010, coupled with a series of pastiches release by Titan books and the publication of Young Sherlock Holmes: Death Cloud by Andy Lane in 2010, are suggestive of a strong and fertile mythology. Unlike Doctor Who, however, this mythology is incredibly diverse (some would say fragmented), crossing genres, engaging in real history, playing with Conan Doyle’s original creations, twisting them into new shapes. So can these different approaches to Holmes be codified in any way, in what ways do they represent Holmes fandom and how might they help us in understanding the future of Doctor Who?

First challenge: summarising the different ways of telling a Holmes story. The difficulty with this is the sheer volume of material out there: short stories, novels, films, television series, radio series, plays, Holmes stories have been told in almost every available narrative format. In addition to this are the books about Holmes: fictional biographies, geographical studies, encyclopaedias, chronologies. Many of these peripheral text could easily be classed as works of narrative fiction of themselves, for example William Baring Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street. Equally many of these studies have informed the pastiches, giving them a mixture of fan credibility, a taste of canonicity and an overall sense of authenticity. So how might we go about categorising this monstrous tangle of texts? Perhaps the best way is to position the pastiches in relation to Conan Doyle’s original stories, charting the ways in which they diverge from the canon.

The first branch of non-canonical Holmes story is the direct pastiche. A line can be drawn from the founding essays of Holmes fan writing and this approach to pastiche. ‘The Great Game’, a creative branch of fan writing that took as its basis the premise that Holmes and Watson were real people, was inspired by pseudo-academic studies of Conan-Doyle by notable figures (and crime writers) such as Dorothy L. Sayers and Ronald Knox. The Great Game lead to a long series of analyses of the original stories, picking them apart, trying to reconcile the holes in the plots and attempting to put them into chronological order. This activity tellingly mimicked the central tenet of the Holmes stories themselves. Holmes fans who engage in the Great Game are, essentially, role-playing Holmes himself and applying his techniques to the stories themselves.

The direct pastiche is almost a by-product of this exercise: an attempt not only to mimic Conan Doyle’s distinctive style but to creatively fill in the gaps. These stories seek to blend in with the original canon and are expressly intended to offer a continuation. Ironically, the direct pastiche includes plotlines that Conan Doyle never used – sequels to The Hound of the Baskervilles, stories (like Bert Coules’ radio series The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) built out of the characteristic, throwaway references to other adventures, stories that flesh out the antagonistic relationship between Holmes and Moriarty.

With Doctor Who, out of the three this approach is perhaps the most recognisable: the Virgin published ‘New Adventures’ riffed on Andrew Cartmel’s designs for the seventh Doctor, the ‘Missing Adventures’, the ‘Past Doctor Adventures’ and the Big Finish audio productions slotted stories into holes between televised adventures and the ‘Eighth Doctor Adventures’ hugely expanded on the 1996 television movie. Each branch of non-televised story broadly adopted the stylings of the series, both mimicking and adding to the core of the mythology. As such, the notion of ‘canon’ is far more complex with Doctor Who than with Sherlock Holmes. With Holmes, the canon is explicitly defined as any story written by Conan Doyle, with Doctor Who, the number of different writers involved makes this distinction impossible.

The next branch of pastiche is more distanced from the source material. As well as pastiches that strive to seamlessly fill the gaps in the canon, there are others that attempt to expand the mythology – allowing Conan Doyle’s original characters to engage in either real historical events (such as the Jack the Ripper killings) or with other fictional characters (such as Dracula). The former type has a rich, semi-mythological source to draw on: the Victorian era, pre-electricity, pre-car, when Britain was still an empire and when London was wreathed in fog. The latter is equally rich in the neo-gothic tradition and the burgeoning popularity of horror fiction: vampires, ghosts, werewolves, supernatural serial killers. Ironically, The Hound of the Baskervilles set a popular template for the Sherlock Holmes pastiche that saw him and Watson combat these fantastical adversaries. Ironic because the original stories, when dealing with the preter- and supernatural, always fell on the side of rationalism. Holmes is the arch-rationalist: cool-headed, analytical, immune from superstition. A possible reason for this conflating of Holmes with the fantastical is the character, particularly in his later years, of Conan Doyle himself. Doyle was a Spiritualist, a member of the Ghost Club and the Society of Psychical Research (think Sea of Souls and Ghost Busters but real), and notoriously because involved in the case Cottingley fairy photographs in the 1920s. Doyle, in a sense, reacted to the emerging technologies of the modern world, the telephone, the photograph, the cinema, with a default position of ‘more things in Heaven and Earth’, as much a believer as Holmes is a sceptic. These beliefs have become fused with the Holmes mythology to the extent that it is now almost a cliché to find Holmes suspending his concrete, rationalist views and engaging in a battle with the forces of darkness.

In some respects, Doctor Who has already made this shift into genre pastiche on its own. Stories such as ‘The Daemons’, ‘Pyramids of Mars’, ‘State of Decay’, ‘Curse of Fenric’, ‘The Unquiet Dead’, ‘Tooth and Claw’, ‘The Shakespeare Code’ and even ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ combine the basic plot of Doctor Who with the tropes, imagery and narratives of ghost stories, of Victorian and Edwardian horror and, fittingly, of the mythologised depiction of London found in so many of the Holmes pastiches. The Holmes and Doctor Who ‘universes’ have already collided in Andy Lane’s (the same Andy Lane who wrote the recent Young Sherlock Holmes novel) New Adventure, All-Consuming Fire. Thus far, Doctor Who hasn’t strayed into genre pastiche to such an extent that the central narrative of the mythology has shifted – the ghost, witch or vampire in Doctor Who is nearly always a stranded alien or alien force and the Devil in ‘The Daemons’ or ‘The Satan Pit’ is a long buried extra-terrestrial around whom a mythology has accrued. The shift is almost bound to happen, however, as the series continues to play with in-vogue mythologies.

It is with the production of the 2009 BBC series Sherlock by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, that the possibility of a blending of the Holmes and Doctor Who mythologies came even closer – and this leads us to the third layer of pastiche, the…

Remake or ‘reimagining’ of the Sherlock Holmes mythology is not a new exercise. The Basil Rathbone movies that Moffat claims influenced he and Mark Gatiss with their latest series gradually morphed from being adaptations of Conan Doyle, through genre pastiche to a completely new take on Sherlock Holmes. Towards the end of the series, after America entered the Second World War, Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson are shown battling Nazis in London, Switzerland, Washington. The Holmes mythology is retooled as a device of contemporary propaganda entirely at odds with and anachronistic to the original stories. With these movies, Holmes became a mobile mythology, still clinging to the fog of Victorian London, but frequently twisting to accommodate the modern world. See the Adam Adamant/Buck Rogers-esque animation Sherlock Holmes in the 2 Century, the timely but unsuccessful references to psycho-analysis and serial killers in the BBC story Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking, or even the pleasingly ‘mockney’, hard-bodied Holmes in the recent Guy Ritchie movies. With these reinterpretations all bets are off – writers and directors can cherry pick, strip down, condense and modernise at will. Only the central character traits and, possibly, the presence of a Watson character are required. Quite often, it is only with these that we get a clear picture of what Sherlock Holmes really is – following these complete deconstructions can a complete map of the mythology be made. For example, the Ritchie movie unpacks the physicality of Holmes, his compulsiveness and restlessness, in a way that no other interpretation has. Moffat and Gatiss’s series exposes the dynamics of a relationship built around a love of danger and adventure. The Rathbone movies, showing Holmes in opposition to 1940s fascism, demonstrate the position of the character as a national icon, an emblem of Empire, tradition and Englishness.

The fear amongst Doctor Who fans is presumably that a similar trend towards rebooting would lead to a break in the cherished continuity. Doctor Who fans bask in the illusion (mostly created by themselves) that the Doctor Who mythology is a single, coherent narrative and that the character played by Matt Smith is exactly the same character played by William Hartnell. So what would happen if, as Gary Russell suggested in an article in the Doctor Who Magazine, the series was remade from scratch in America? What if a movie was made that jettisoned the BBC endorsed back-story and that retained only the central idea of a benevolent alien travelling in time? This remains to be seen but the position of those central, canonical Holmes stories possibly gives us a clue. The Holmes stories have developed a kind of hub and spoke model in which the canon is sacrosanct and all peripheral texts are accepted and even embraced, but are also defined by their distance from it. In recent years (since 1989) Doctor Who has made the first step towards this model with the steady expansion of independent and BBC endorsed productions. The New Adventures, Bill Bagg’s spin off dramas, the Big Finish audio adventures, Scream of the Shalka (which features an alternative, but BBC sanctioned, Ninth Doctor), Torchwood, Sarah Jane, even the new television series itself, all, depending on your perspective, muddy the water or enrich the mythology of Doctor Who. They all exist (or perhaps co-exist) in relation to the hub of the original BBC series.

Perhaps as we enter the next fifty years we are standing on the brink of an explosion of reboots and reinterpretations as we can see with Sherlock Holmes – but there is always the original.