What would Sherlock Holmes have made of Facebook?

I’m talking about Conan Doyle’s Sherlock. The guy with the pipe, not the one with the iPhone that to millions of people is Sherlock Holmes. And I’m certainly not talking about the one that lives in New York with a footballer’s tattoo up his arm, or the shirtless action hero who brawls in bars.

No, I’m talking about the Sherlock who my generation grew up reading (and the previous several generations). The original Sherlock Holmes. Now I’ve cleared up who we’re talking about, what would Sherlock Holmes have made of Facebook?

My guess is that he would have been ambivalent. On the one hand he would have seen it as an invaluable reference tool. After all, if he wanted to know the background gossip on someone he usually had to dress up in full costume and Hollywood grade make up in order to pass himself off as a drug addled down and out in an opium den (The Man with the Twisted Lip) or a simple minded clergyman (A Scandal in Bohemia) – which quite frankly seems like quite a lot of effort, especially for such a busy man. With Facebook at his disposal, Sherlock would surely find a way to befriend the target of his suspicions and in minutes he’d know everything from their shoe size to their taste in films to what they think about the latest current affairs – in other words how they live and, crucially, how they think.

But on the other hand all that trivial nonsense that gets spouted on the Western world’s favourite social network, all the mindless drivel, the monotonous timewasting, the relentless opinionating surely would give him absolute contempt for Facebook as source of entertainment (as he’d have for blogs like this no doubt).

And yet whatever he would have thought, there is no denying that Facebook has become the single place where you will find more fans of the great detective in his many incarnations than anywhere else.

Launching Sherlock Audiobook (and creating a new Facebook page) has given me a excellent excuse to trawl Facebook looking for likeminded pages to connect to. From the point of view of reaching people who have a proven interest in a topic (in this case a fictional consulting detective) it is quite incredible.

I have found pages with a combined fanbase of literally millions of people.

I know Sherlock Holmes is hugely popular. He’s one of those Victorian characters that is here to stay, like Dracula and Frankenstein. He’s just part of our collective memory, our culture.

But I didn’t know he was quite this popular.

It has to be said that most of the fan activity on Facebook however doesn’t seem to revolve around the guy in the pipe I wrote about at the beginning of this post.

It’s the shirtless action hero and the one with the iPhone (and to a much lesser extent the guy with the tatt) that are creating all the buzz. It’s the new Sherlocks. That probably would have suited the guy with the pipe quite well. Fame, while on the one hand went some way to indulging his substantial ego, was on the whole more of an inconvenience as it meant he had to keep hitting the dressing up box to avoid being recognised. Unless of course he just liked dressing up, but that is more of a tangent for fan fiction I suspect.