The game’s afoot, but not genuine

IF Arthur Conan Doyle tired of Sherlock Holmes, readers never have. To meet the ongoing demand, other writers have been creating adventures for the great detective for more than a century. Scholars estimate that more than 900 “noncanonical” Sherlock tales exist. The new collection, “Ghosts in Baker Street,” adds 10 to the count.

Authors began expanding Holmes’ caseload while Doyle was alive, and those stories anticipated the modern phenomenon of fan fiction. In the decades since, amateurs wrote new adventures for favorite literary, comic book, radio, film or TV heroes, but their readership was generally restricted to classmates and friends. There were no publishers for these amateur efforts.

Today, the Internet has become a vast repository of fan fiction devoted to Sherlock Holmes as well as to “Star Trek,” “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars.” These stories range from the competent to the egregious and weird.

In Japan, the trend has been carried even further with doujinshi -- self-published fan comics that creators of the original manga and animated series allow to exist, assuming they promote the characters. Only a small number of doujinshi have made it to America, but in Japan they’re the subject of major conventions. Many of them are straightforward adventures for popular characters from such anime as “Trigun,” “Rurouni Kenshin” and “Full Metal Alchemist.”

But yaoi stories, gay romances between young males written by and for women, are enjoying a vogue. These tales involve not only Japanese characters, but Western ones, including characters from “Harry Potter.”

The stories in “Ghosts in Baker Street” are vastly superior to fan fiction, but they still fall short of their model. None of the authors succeeds in capturing Doyle’s delightfully fustian Victorian prose. Like many artists trying to work in the vocabulary of another era, these writers don’t capture the style correctly. The stories recall the less successful creations of the 19th century gothic revival, in which writers strove for the stolid dignity of the Houses of Parliament but ended up with the gaudy silliness of the Albert Memorial.

In Jon L. Breen’s “The Adventure of the Librarian’s Ghost,” Richard Bootcrafter tells Holmes that most of his servants “have been with the family for generations,” implying that the “frequently witty Member of Parliament” commands a rather superannuated staff.

Loren D. Estlemen’s “The Devil and Sherlock Holmes” has the detective dealing with the disappearance of the son of a Boston industrialist who had been sent to London to request the hand of a lord’s daughter to “merge their American fortune with noble blood.” He has it backward: In the late 19th century, the daughters of rich Americans were married to the sons of noble families, trading a dowry for the cache of a title.

The stories in “Ghosts in Baker Street” center on the supernatural or seemingly supernatural occurrences. Although Doyle became interested in spiritualism in his later life, his detective dismissed the notion of the supernatural in an all-too-often quoted passage from “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.” (He also ridiculed the Baskerville family legend of a monstrous hound as something of interest “to a collector of fairy tales.”)

Significantly, the most interesting story in the collection doesn’t imitate Doyle’s use of Watson as the narrator. “Selden’s Tale” by Daniel Stashower presents some of the events in “The Hound of the Baskervilles” from the point of view of a minor character, “Selden, the Notting Hill murderer.”

Of the more conventional stories, Paula Cohen’s “The Adventure of the Dog in the Nighttime” comes the closest to capturing Doyle’s cadences and plot twists.

“Ghosts in Baker Street” may appeal to die-hard fans, but none of the stories in it offers the satisfaction of returning to the canon to unravel the mystery of the Musgrave Ritual, forestall a scandal that would rock the Bohemian throne or pursue Professor Moriarty to the brink of Reichenbach Falls.

Charles Solomon is the author of many books, including “Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation,” and a frequent contributor to The Times and National Public Radio’s program “Day to Day.”