Not sure whether this is what you want, but, as someone who first read Holmes when I was 12 (12 is the 'golden age' for genre literature!) back in 1965, and then, because the canon, while long by most fandom standards, wasn't long enough for me, went out and found as much periperal/transformative work as I could. Ellery Queen's 'Misadventures' collection, August Derleth's 'Solar Pons', and various of the 'Irregulars' fictional pieces.
All of these focussed far more on the detective problems than on Holmes and Watson's relationship. But by the 70s there were some small press 'relationship' works. Even among the canon purists who claimed that Holmes was never the same after the Reichenbach Falls incident, didn't want to give up on Watson's faint in 'The Empty House', or Holmes' panic when he thinks Watson is wounded in 'Three Garridebs' - so no-one was very surprised when Rohase Piercy's 'My Dearest Holmes' hit the (gay) bookshops in 1988.
By then I was reading (and writing) a lot of slash in TV fandoms (Trek, The Professionals, Blakes Seven), but even the advent of the Brett TV series didn't seem to trigger a lot of slash contributions to the multi-media slash zines - though there were probably dedicated Holmes slash zines circulating these seemed to be wholly among the book-fandom itself and not among the wider sf/detective fiction slash community.
I think the first online Holmes slash I came across was as a result of reading Sheenagh Pugh's 'The Democratic Genre' in 2005. And that, too, was book-based and often Watson pastiche (and there's a whole other essay to be written on the book-canon fandoms who stick to pastiche, and the ones who experiment with style - I'm looking at Jane Austen fandom here…)
I wouldn't presume to shake my walking stick at the kids on the lawn though. In fact, before the 2009 film came out I spent a lot of time defending Guy Ritchie's decisions to make Holmes a more active figure than the Brett version - on the grounds that canon Holmes does have a reputation as a pugilist - and does inhabit an underworld London closer to Ritchie's modern work than the 'gaslamps and hansom cabs' of most other media portrayals. I just wish that a few of the writers who came to Holmes via the movie would at least show some knowledge that there is a book canon. And a bit of awareness of real-life British gay history.
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branchandroot
Here from Holmsian_news
Date: 2010-05-15 12:15 pm (UTC)All of these focussed far more on the detective problems than on Holmes and Watson's relationship. But by the 70s there were some small press 'relationship' works. Even among the canon purists who claimed that Holmes was never the same after the Reichenbach Falls incident, didn't want to give up on Watson's faint in 'The Empty House', or Holmes' panic when he thinks Watson is wounded in 'Three Garridebs' - so no-one was very surprised when Rohase Piercy's 'My Dearest Holmes' hit the (gay) bookshops in 1988.
By then I was reading (and writing) a lot of slash in TV fandoms (Trek, The Professionals, Blakes Seven), but even the advent of the Brett TV series didn't seem to trigger a lot of slash contributions to the multi-media slash zines - though there were probably dedicated Holmes slash zines circulating these seemed to be wholly among the book-fandom itself and not among the wider sf/detective fiction slash community.
I think the first online Holmes slash I came across was as a result of reading Sheenagh Pugh's 'The Democratic Genre' in 2005. And that, too, was book-based and often Watson pastiche (and there's a whole other essay to be written on the book-canon fandoms who stick to pastiche, and the ones who experiment with style - I'm looking at Jane Austen fandom here…)
I wouldn't presume to shake my walking stick at the kids on the lawn though. In fact, before the 2009 film came out I spent a lot of time defending Guy Ritchie's decisions to make Holmes a more active figure than the Brett version - on the grounds that canon Holmes does have a reputation as a pugilist - and does inhabit an underworld London closer to Ritchie's modern work than the 'gaslamps and hansom cabs' of most other media portrayals. I just wish that a few of the writers who came to Holmes via the movie would at least show some knowledge that there is a book canon. And a bit of awareness of real-life British gay history.