Fair Exchange?: Between The Afterlives Of Holmes And Raffles

This article addresses the relationship between Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, detective, and E. W. Hornung's Arthur J. Raffles, burglar, in the hinterland of adaptations and parodies that surrounds the source texts in which each fictional character originally appeared. It examines in detail one particular example, John Kendrick Bangs's R. Holmes & Co (1906), which irreverently narrates the adventures of a young man who is the offspring of Holmes and Raffles's daughter. A character holding in tension the contradictory traits of each of his illustrious male ancestors, the figure of Raffles Holmes offers scholars a fascinating insight into how early twentieth-century readers saw Holmes and Raffles, but also raises interesting questions about the relations between textual and sexual reproduction in a period in which the literary marketplace was evolving fast. Addressing Bangs's text in detail we here think afresh about the implicit functions of the homosocial literary partnerships posited at the heart of Doyle's and Hornung's most successful writings, and open up new avenues for understanding the queer energies in play within some of the most popular literature of the late-Victorian era.