Today we pour some out for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes, who passed away on July 7, 1930 at the age of 71.  His death marked the end of a prolific career that not only gave us one of the most iconic literary characters but also contributed significantly to the detective fiction genre.  Doyle’s last words, spoken to his wife, were reportedly, “You are wonderful.”

There’s something unreasonably grand about the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shuffled off this mortal coil.  Those final words – “You are wonderful,” whispered to his wife – are hardly the stuff of mundane, fading-out inertia.  They leave you imagining some kind of Victorian fireworks display framing his departure, ornate letters spelling out his bow in curling smoke.  It’s almost too perfect.  Too wrapped in velvet and dipped in sepia-toned drama to feel real.  But what could be more fitting for the man who, through some strange alchemy of character engineering and narrative bravado, birthed Sherlock Holmes, a figure so steadfast in the collective imagination he might as well be carved into Mount Rushmore next to the guy with the top hat?

As mentioned above, the man died on July 7, 1930, at the age of 71, presumably exhausted from a career spent revolutionizing detective while moonlighting as history’s most confounding paradox.  Here’s a guy who gave the world Sherlock Holmes – deductive reasoning incarnate – only to spend a solid chunk of his later years chasing ghosts, spouting spiritualist woo-woo, and attempting, with alarming sincerity, to convince the public that fairies were real.  Real fairies.  With wings and everything.  It’s the kind of creative dissonance that makes you wonder if genius simply always comes with a side order of lunacy.  A complex combo meal for the mind.

But Doyle’s death was like turning off a spotlight, leaving the stage dark while the velvet curtains swayed and creaked in some unseen draft.  No encore, no standing ovation.  Except, of course, that we’re still clapping.  We’re clapping every time someone reaches for The Hound of the Baskervilles on a crowded airport bookshelf or binge-watches the latest adaptation of a Holmes story that Doyle himself probably would’ve rolled his eyes at.  And for what it’s worth, the adaptations do keep coming.  Hundreds of them.  The character has been dissected, reset, gender-swapped, modernized, de-modernized, and even turned into a vaguely anthropomorphic mouse detective – none of which has diminished his relevance.  Even when Holmes appears as a snarky sociopath who plays the violin like he’s trying to strangle Mozart’s ghost, he remains weirdly eternal.

It’s a hell of a legacy for a guy who, by all accounts, got bored of the character halfway through writing him.  There’s an irony there, dear reader, is there not?  Doyle’s genius wasn’t in his ability to adore Holmes, but in his ability to construct him so well that the rest of us can’t stop adoring him for him.  It’s like building a ship you hate, only to realize it’s the sturdiest thing afloat, indestructible even when it’s battered around by the gales of pop culture.  Doyle himself tried to sink it – drowning Holmes in the icy chasm of Reichenbach Falls.  But good luck holding down something that millions of readers are collectively begging to resurrect.  Like Lazarus in a deerstalker hat, Holmes returned, and, to Doyle’s resigned irritation, never left.

But Doyle’s contributions didn’t stop there.  At a time when the detective story was still flailing about in its infancy like a drunk looking for their keys, he took it by the scruff of its neck and told it to shape up.  The genre had existed before Doyle – Poe’s Dupin waddled so Holmes could strike with brisk efficiency – but Doyle sharpened it down to a fine point.  He gave detective fiction its rigor, its bit, and, most importantly, its enduring sense of clever possibility.  He’s the reason we can believe – against all evidence to the contrary – that any puzzle, no matter how tangled, can be solved with enough brainpower and an alarming tolerance for pipe smoke.

And yet, Doyle somehow managed to life his life as if entirely unconcerned by what he was doing to the literary world.  He wrote feverishly, yes, but his focus was broader, more scattered, like a flashlight with a weak battery.  He dabbled in just about everything -writing historical novels, dabbling in politics, obsessing over paranormal nonsense.  It’s almost as though he didn’t quite realize he was in the middle of creating a cultural giant.  Or maybe, in true contrarian fashion, he simply didn’t give a shit.

Now here we are, nearly a century after his death, still tangled in the web of his imagination, still arguing about which Sherlock actor captured the “true” Holmes, still swearing that we’d totally outwit Moriarty if given the chance.  Doyle may have stepped away from the stage, but the play – thank God for it – goes on, loud and puzzling and impossible to put down.  His legacy is a testament to the peculiar power of storytelling – something that can outlast even the stories’ creator.  If that’s not a kind of immortality, then I don’t know what is.

N.P.: “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum – Signals MIX” – Collide