Sherlock Holmes has long been a popular character for pastiche, Holmes-related work by authors and creators other than Arthur Conan Doyle. Their works can be grouped into four broad categories: New Sherlock Holmes stories; Stories in which Holmes appears in a cameo role; Stories about imagined descendants of Sherlock Holmes; Stories inspired by Sherlock Holmes but which do not include Holmes himself.
Sherlock Holmes stories New Sherlock Holmes stories fall into many categories, including: Additional Sherlock Holmes stories in the conventional mould; Holmes placed in settings of contemporary interest (such as World War II or the future); Crossover stories in which Holmes is pitted against other fictional characters (for example, vampires); Explorations of unusual aspects of Holmes' character which are hinted at in Conan Doyle's works (e.g., drug use).
In 1913, the Greek novel Sherlock Holmes saving Mr. Venizelos (Ο Σέρλοκ Χολμς σώζων τον κ. Βενιζέλον) was serialized in the magazine Hellas. Written by an anonymous author, it describes Holmes' attempts to save Eleftherios Venizelos from a Bulgarian organization's assassination plot during the London Conference of 1912–13. It is considered the first detective novel of Greek literature.
Vincent Starrett's 1920 short story The Adventure of the Unique "Hamlet" sees Holmes investigating a missing 1602 edition of the titular play.
In January 1928, the short story "My Dear Holmes" was published in Punch, or the London Charivari. The sub-title of the story was: "His positively last appearance on earth." Written from the point of view of Holmes, it starts out in the usual way, and then ends rather lamely with no mystery presented or solved, but Holmes dead of incautiously (and improbably) sniffing excessively at a bottle of an anesthetic ("A.C.E.") he has asked Watson to bring with them on an errand.
In 1942, a short story entitled "The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted" was discovered by a Conan Doyle biographer, Hesketh Pearson, while searching through a trunk full of Doyle family papers. It was published in 1947 as a "lost" story written by Conan Doyle, but it was eventually discovered by Pearson that the story was originally written in 1914 by Arthur Whitaker, who had sent it to Doyle in hope of a collaboration. Doyle had bought the story from the author, in case he might use the ingenious plot at a later date, but never did.
In 1944, American mystery writers Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee (writing under their joint pseudonym Ellery Queen) published The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of thirty-three pastiches written by various well-known authors including Agatha Christie, Mark Twain and Anthony Boucher.
In 1947, noted theologian and mystery writer Ronald A. Knox penned The Adventure of the First Class Carriage. It was published in the pages of The Strand Magazine where many of the original Holmes stories had first been printed.
Arthur Conan Doyle's son, Adrian Conan Doyle, wrote—in a joint effort with John Dickson Carr—12 Sherlock Holmes short stories that were published under the title The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes in 1954.
The Crown Prince of Siam, the future King Vajiravudh created the character Nai Thong-in and his side-kick the lawyer Mr. Wat, and published them in Thai in 1904-1905. Vajiravudh borrowed ideas from Sherlock Holmes in the creation of his mystery stories.
Using his alternate name of H.F. Heard, Gerald Heard wrote three novels about a reclusive beekeeper in the English countryside who goes by the name of Mycroft; he is clearly intended to be Sherlock Holmes, but the books were written before the Doyle estate gave permission for other writers to use the name. The three stories are A Taste for Honey, Reply Paid and The Notched Hairpin. A Taste for Honey was adapted for American TV in 1955 as "Sting of Death," with Boris Karloff as Mr. Mycroft.
American novelist and filmmaker Nicholas Meyer has written six Holmes novels: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974), The West End Horror (1976), The Canary Trainer (1993), The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols (2019), and The Return of the Pharaoh (2021), and Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell (2024).
In 1977, the novel Exit Sherlock Holmes: The Great Detective's Final Days by Robert Lee Hall was published and featured an exploration of Holmes' origins with a science fiction twist. In this account Holmes and Moriarty are revealed to be from the future.
Randall Collins published in 1978 The Case of the Philosophers' Ring, under the pseudonym Dr. John H. Watson, with Holmes' services requested at Cambridge, around 1914, by Bertrand Russell, and meeting the Cambridge Apostles (Moore, Hardy, Keynes...) Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Annie Besant and of course, Aleister Crowley as a perfect villain.
Michael Dibdin's novel The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1979) confronts a somewhat psychopathic Sherlock Holmes with the crimes of Jack the Ripper, whom Holmes suspects to be Professor James Moriarty. Raymond Smullyan wrote The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes (1979), in which Holmes (with Watson) applies retrograde analysis to solve chess problems.
The detective novelist Loren D. Estleman wrote several short stories and two novels featuring Holmes; the novels pit the detective against Count Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, respectively. The former was adapted for radio by the BBC.
Cay Van Ash wrote the novel Ten Years Beyond Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes matches wits with the diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu (1984), set in 1914, in which the apparently retired detective comes into conflict with Sax Rohmer's villainous master criminal.
Canadian writer Ron Weyman published three novels between 1989 and 1994 which imagined Sherlock Holmes as being sent to Canada at the behest of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales and investigating crimes there."RON WEYMAN, 91 SAILOR, PRODUCER, PAINTER AND NOVELIST: Pioneer filmmaker turned hard-hitting social issues into popular television". The Globe and Mail, 7 July 2007.
Holmes aficionado Stephen Fry wrote a short story featuring Holmes, "The Adventure of the Laughing Jarvey", in which Holmes and Watson encounter a great Victorian writer and are engaged on a mission to recover a lost manuscript. It includes introductory text claiming the tale itself to be a long-lost manuscript, which modern analysis has shown to use linguistic style and grammar typical of Watson. The story appears in Fry's collection of journalism and early writings, Paperweight (1992). In Stephen King's short story "The Doctor's Case" (1993), Holmes's alleged allergy to cats prevents him for once from solving the problem quicker than Watson. Barrie Roberts penned a series of Holmes pastiches, including Sherlock Holmes and the Man from Hell and Sherlock Holmes and the Railway Maniac from 1994 until his death in 2007. O Xangô de Baker Street (1995) tells the comic story of Sherlock Holmes's visit to Brazil, invited by the Emperor Dom Pedro II, to solve the disappearance of a Stradivarius violin which becomes a hunt for a serial killer. Larry Millett has written six books and a short story featuring Holmes solving mysteries in Minnesota. Michael Mallory has written more than two dozen short stories and two novels featuring "Amelia Watson," the second wife of Dr. Watson. These are not pastiches so much as original detective stories that view Holmes and Watson from a different and somewhat humorous point of view. Colin Bruce's The Strange Case of Mrs. Hudson's Cat: And Other Science Mysteries Solved by Sherlock Holmes (1997) and Conned Again, Watson!: Cautionary Tales of Logic, Maths and Probability (2001) are books of Sherlock Holmes stories in which Holmes uses scientific and mathematical approaches respectively to solve mysteries. The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years (1999), by Tibetan author Jamyang Norbu is an account of Holmes's adventures in India and Tibet where, posing as Sigerson, he meets the Dalai Lama and Huree Chunder Mookerjee, a character from Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim.
The collection Shadows Over Baker Street (2003) contains 14 stories by 20 authors pitting Holmes against the forces of the Cthulhu Mythos. Among them is Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald", which won the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. The title is a play on A Study in Scarlet. The narrator, never named (but whose initials in the end point him to be the criminal henchman of James Moriarty, Sebastian Moran; his tour in Afghanistan point to this as well), meets the protagonist (who is also never named, but likely Moriarty himself in a role-reversal, making him the detective and Holmes the criminal) under similar circumstances to the meeting of Holmes and Watson in A Study in Scarlet, even down to the deduction that the narrator has recently been in Afghanistan. The protagonist is tall and thin, a detective, chemist, and master of disguise. However, as the narrator and his friend investigate a murder of one of the Royal Family (shown to be the Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos) the murderer is revealed to be a tall, thin, pipe-smoking man, going by the name Sherry Vernet (a reference to the first name Sherlock, or possibly Conan Doyle's earlier "Sherrinford", and the last name of Holmes' grandmother). He is assisted by a "limping doctor", later tentatively identified as John (or possibly James) Watson. "Vernet" also had gone by the name Sigerson. Inspector Lestrade also appears in the story. Gaiman has also written a short story called "The Case of Death and Honey", which was featured in "A Study in Sherlock" and "Trigger Warning."
Michael Chabon wrote The Final Solution in 2004. This book, which received favorable reviews, deals with an elderly Sherlock Holmes, referred to only as 'the old man,' solving the case of the missing parrot belonging to a nine-year-old Jewish refugee boy from Germany. While readily solving the mystery, 'the old man' and the rest of the characters in the novella fail to see what the parrot's incessant muttering of random German numbers really means.
Caleb Carr was approached to pen a tale for the anthology Ghosts of Baker Street. Carr's short story grew to become a full length novel which became 2005's The Italian Secretary. An example of a Sherlock Holmes pastiche is found in The Curse of the Nibelung: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery (2005) by Sam North, which is currently in reprint. It finds Holmes at the very end of his career, together with a geriatric Watson, sent by Winston Churchill to Nazi Germany to help uncover a terrible secret. Elemental, querido Chaplin, by Rafael Marín (2005, Minotauro, Barcelona, ), is presented as a false document unpublished manuscript in which Charles Chaplin tells how, as a London poor child, he helped Sherlock Holmes in an adventure against Dr. Fu Manchu. Nick Rennison's 2006 Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography is a "biography" of the detective much like William S. Baring-Gould's earlier Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World's First Consulting Detective.
Mitch Cullin's novel A Slight Trick of the Mind (2005) takes place two years after the end of the Second World War and explores the character of Sherlock Holmes (now 93) as he comes to terms with a life spent in emotionless logic. Now old and frail, his once-steel trap mind begins to fail him as he loses items and forgets whole parts of his day. The story follows Holmes both at his home where he now tends bees in quiet retirement, as well as a vacation in Japan where he observes their post-war society first-hand. The novel is also interspersed with chapters from Holmes's's own book that reveal a fleeting moment of love that even he does not yet realise. It was adapted into the film Mr. Holmes starring Ian McKellen. The film released in 2015.