Making the literarygeographical world of Sherlock Holmes The game is afoot

<b>The ideas and practices that bring a fictional character into reality. </b><br><br> In the second half of the twentieth century, American readers of Arthur Conan Doyle?s Sherlock Holmes stories?known as Sherlockians?worked together to create a world of Sherlock Holmes that crossed the boundary between reality and fiction. This book explores this Sherlockian world through an innovative lens informed both by geographical theories of spatiality as a process and literary scholarship readers? active roles in making stories happen. In doing so, the work helps to define the contours of a world in which the ontological boundary ordinarily assumed between the actual and the fictional bends, blurs, and breaks. <br><br> Drawing extensively on the University of Minnesota?s Sherlock Holmes Collections, the world?s largest archive of Sherlockiana, this book shines new light on Sherlockian activities in the mid-to late-twentieth century. It was during this relatively understudied but creatively rich period that the imaginative foundations of the fandom as we know it were laid, and readers created a rich, ever-expanding world of Sherlock Holmes through a variety of textual and embodied practices: writing, mapping, playing, and walking.