Baker street regular

A biography of the fictional character Sherlock Holmes displays the author's intricate knowledge of the subject but it fails to live up to expectations, writes Charles Taylor

Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorised Biography. By Nick Rennison. Atlantic Monthly Press, €18

One of the more charming details in Nick Rennison's Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography is that, until recently, a secretary at the Abbey National Building Society, located on London's Baker Street, was engaged to answer the letters written to Holmes. Letters to a fictional character? You can think of that as a mark of the gullible or as the kind of thing people did in the bygone past. But Janet Maslin's recent New York Times review of Michael Connelly's latest thriller revealed that there exists today a number in Los Angeles where you can leave messages for Connelly's serialised detective, Harry Bosch.

The afterlife of literary characters, in new adventures imagined for them by authors other than their creators, fill bookstore shelves. Online, fan fiction proliferates. This sort of homage used to be called pastiche – and probably no fictional character has inspired more of it than Sherlock Holmes. Not just pastiche, either, but all manner of psychological, literary and cultural studies. (In the early 1990s the mystery pooh-bah and publisher Otto Penzler gathered some of the best in a series called 'Otto Penzler's Sherlock Holmes Library')

So Rennison may not be the first author to treat Holmes as a real historical figure, but a "biography" – with all of its historical context – is still a swell idea. Because Holmes is so vivid to generations of readers, so is the world he inhabits. That might go without saying but at a time when the ruthless speed of culture has fostered an amnesiac response to the day before yesterday, the past no longer seems real to many people.

"We think we know the Victorians," Rennison writes in his introduction. "In contrast to our contradictory selves, grappling with the complexities of modernity and postmodernity, they seem the products of a simpler era." He goes on to outline the stakes here – the reason Holmes is, for him, more than just one of the most beloved characters of fiction. "The ambiguities of Holmes's character mirror those of the age in which he came to maturity. Highly rational and committed to the idea of progress, he was haunted by darker dreams and more troubling emotions. Drawn into the service of an empire that he knew, intellectually at least, had already passed its zenith, he remained steadfast in his commitment to it." He concludes his introduction: "To follow Holmes through the twists and turns of his career in the 1880s and 1890s is to watch the Victorian era battling with its own demons."

If only Rennison had delivered on this promise. He has a hawkeye for recognizing the gaps of time in Watson's Boswelling and for places where the chronology makes no sense – all the disjunctions you'd expect in a series written in installments over several decades. But it is the kind of fandom of someone who can rattle off batting averages and league standings without telling you why they matter.

Rennison wants to tie Holmes to Jack the Ripper, the Crippen murder case, the first world war and espionage work taken, as Rennison imagines it, at the behest of Holmes's brother, Mycroft, a muckety-muck in the highest shadowy echelons of the British government. But instead of plunging Holmes into these cases, instead of showing how he clashed or dovetailed with the sensibility of his age, he assigns the detective a series of Zelig-like cameos on the fringes of history, both grand and tawdry. Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography is a chance for Rennison to show off his knowledge of Holmes minutiae and his research on the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. But it's a good deal less entertaining than the best of those pastiches, like Nicholas Meyer's Seven-Per-Cent Solution (and the film of that novel, directed by Herbert Ross).

It would be denying Rennison his due, though, not to mention that as his book draws to a close and Holmes's energies decline, he makes us mourn for the detective – and, more to the point, for an age that does not contain him. This is not the book you'd hope for, but that it exists at all seems almost a rejoinder to our own time. Two centuries hence, can we imagine any contemporary fictional characters inspiring such an act of love?

©New York Times