Holmes in the Empire

Busting open Anglo-centric models of crime fiction that position Sherlock Holmes as a core signifier and originator of the genre to which all other works must relate or respond, this book draws on international and transmedia case studies to challenge narrow academic conceptions of authorship, genre and world crime fiction. As Harris-Peyton demonstrates, Holmsian-centred models reinforce colonial ideas of the genre that determine how authorship, originality, and textual value is assigned in a global crime fiction marketplace. In exploring works by Conan Doyle with texts by authors writing in postcolonial India and China as well as contemporary internet fandoms, games, and television adaptations, Harris Peyton offers a new model of the crime fiction genre that is neither colonial or hierarchical but that reimagines crime fiction as a genre shaped by its own transnational movement, intercultural traditions and whose membership is determined globally by its participants. Combining crime fiction studies, postcolonial theory, theories of adaptation, and digital humanities methods as means of analysis, the book investigates such texts as A Study in Scarlet, the original works and film and television adaptations of Satyajit Ray’s Feluda mysteries, Cheng Xiaoqing’s Huo Sang mysteries, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s Bakshi stories, the TV show Elementary and fan-produced products responding to Sherlock. Within and beyond crime fiction studies, this is an important reminder that lingering colonial models of authorship and textual hierarchy continue to shape our economies of attention in an anglophone cultural marketplace.