Shadrach Voles, Upchuck Gnomes, Rockhard Scones and Blowback Foams: None of these great made-up detectives appear in Otto Penzler’s giant compendium of fake Sherlock Holmes stories, or Sherlock-Holmes-stories-written-by-persons-other-than-Sir-Arthur-Conan-Doyle. You will, however, be able to find stories about Sherlaw Kombs, and Solar Pons, and Picklock Holes, and Shamrock Jolnes, and Warlock Bones and (my own pick of the pseudo-Holmeses) Hemlock Jones, who in Bret Harte’s “The Stolen Cigar-Case” almost destroys the ardently worshipful Watson-like narrator with the sheer puissance of his intellect. On Hemlock Jones’s shelves are glass jars containing “pavement and road sweepings” and “fluff from omnibus and road-car seats.” When he thinks, his head shrinks, “so much reduced in size by his mental compression that his hat tipped back from his forehead and literally hung on his massive ears.” Jones’s diamond-­encrusted cigar case, a present from the Turkish ambassador, has gone missing. There can be only one culprit: the narrator himself! Jones lays out the case, deduction by damning deduction. “So overpowering was his penetration,” declares the narrator in a fit of purest proto-Kafka, “that although I knew myself innocent, I licked my lips with avidity to hear the further details of this lucid exposition of my crime.”

We in 2015, we the entertained, who live in a fun house of Sherlocks — Cumberbatch Sherlock, Downey Jr. Sherlock, Jonny Lee Miller Sherlock, etc. — need no convincing of the imaginative vitality of Sherlock Holmes. But the fact that Bret Harte, revered and shaggy forebear, of whose stories Conan Doyle felt his own early efforts to be but “feeble echoes,” could come out in 1900 with such a spot-on and beautifully modern satire of a Sherlock Holmes story tells us something of the immediacy with which Holmes franchised himself into popular consciousness. He quickly overcame his creator, of course: Having plunged Holmes — for good, it seemed — into the Reichenbach Falls in the fatal embrace of his shadow-self, Moriarty, in 1893’s “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle found himself, 10 years later, rewriting his own story. “We tottered together upon the brink of the fall,” Holmes explains to a not unreasonably astonished Watson in 1903’s “The Adventure of the Empty House.” “I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me. I slipped through his grip.” Slippery, unkillable Holmes!

What’s his secret? In a sense Holmes is the perfect literary creation: a caricature with depth. A few quick strokes — pipe, brain, violin, Watson — call him into being, while beyond these scant markings an abyss of personality instantly suggests itself. Dimensions open up, speculation is invited, and what Tolkien called “sub-­creation” occurs: People begin to tell their own stories about him. There’s his tragic side, the paradoxically romantic ennui that arises from his being such a brilliant micro-materialist, knowing everything about train timetables and typography and trousers but finding himself lonely, so lonely, in this suddenly atomic and demystified universe. He reaches for his drugs, he scrapes at his violin; he shoots holes in the walls of his apartment. Around him, invisibly, a vast cerebral plexus shimmers and twangs. Then there’s his fantastic and inexhaustible yin-yang buddy-movie Quixote-Panza double act with John H. Watson, M.D., whose awe-struck narrations keep Holmes at one remove from us, the human race.