Conan Doyle Estate to collaborate with Simon and Schuster

 

Arthur Conan Doyle © Conan Doyle Estate

Simon & Schuster UK has entered into an official collaboration with the Conan Doyle Estate on a programme of new and backlist titles following on from their recent collaboration, Holmes & Moriarty by Gareth Rubin.

The partnership will see the creation of “new works based on the characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle”, and some backlist titles, both inside and outside the Holmes canon, “repackaged and republished”. All titles will be officially endorsed by the Conan Doyle Estate.

To launch the publishing programme, Simon & Schuster UK will be publishing a short-story anthology entitled Sherlock, which will feature an introduction by Stephen Fry, along with new stories from Kate Mosse, Anthony Horowitz, SA Cosby, Sarah Perry, Joe Hill, Vaseem Khan, Janice Hallett, Abir Mukherjee and Steve Cavanagh. Sherlock will be published in autumn 2026.

Katherine Armstrong, deputy publishing director for Crime and Thriller Fiction, agreed the deal with Jon Wood at Rogers, Coleridge and White for world all-language rights including audio. Atria, part of Simon & Schuster US, will also be publishing the new works and distributing the backlist titles.

Armstrong said: “I am particularly delighted to be working with the Conan Doyle Estate on these projects. Not only do I – and everyone at Simon & Schuster – share the Estate’s aim to create a lasting legacy of Conan Doyle’s works for many generations to come, but the Sherlock Holmes stories were some of my favourites growing up. I could not be more thrilled to be collaborating with the Estate on a full programme of backlist and new projects to take us to at least 2030”.

“Doyle’s influence on the crime-fiction genre has been immense and the character of Sherlock Holmes has seen and inspired many iterations over the past 140 years, but Doyle was also an intrepid traveller, a soldier, a campaigner for justice, and a scientist, among other things, so there is a wealth of material to explore. I am incredibly excited by the brilliant authors who have already agreed to write new short stories for our Sherlock anthology, and we are also working on a new official biography of Conan Doyle to publish on the anniversary of his death in 2030. There are many exciting projects in the pipeline that I can’t wait to share with existing fans and to introduce to new readers!”

Richard Pooley from the Conan Doyle Estate said: “The Conan Doyle Estate’s mission is to further the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and keep a torch shining on him and his characters for generations to come. Nearly 140 years ago, Conan Doyle created one of the world’s most famous fictional characters. To our knowledge, Sherlock Holmes is still the most depicted character in print, film and TV. But it was Conan Doyle’s genius and significant involvement in so many aspects of life we must also remember. As he himself wrote: ’I have had a life which, for variety and romance, could hardly be exceeded.’  The Simon & Schuster official collaboration with the Conan Doyle Estate will help to bring Sir Arthur out of the shadow of Sherlock Holmes and to continue to tell the life story and work of this remarkable renaissance man.”

Jon Wood added: “Arthur Conan Doyle was a renaissance genius in so many ways – a crime writer, a science-fiction novelist, a politician, a thinker and a visionary. He was also the creator of unarguably the most successful fictional character of all time – Sherlock Holmes. This new relationship with Simon & Schuster worldwide is an unparalleled opportunity to rediscover Arthur and revitalise all his works. I’m so grateful to be part of these efforts along with the Estate, Katherine Armstrong and the whole team around the world.” 

 

Conan Doyle and Storytelling - Call For Papers

 

Edinburgh Conan Doyle Network Conference 

‘Conan Doyle and Storytelling’ 

10–11 December 2021 

Birkbeck, University of London

Keynote speakers: 

Professor Christine Ferguson, University of Stirling 

Professor Robert Hampson, Royal Holloway, University of London 

“‘Pray compose yourself, sir,’ said Holmes, ‘and let me have a clear account of who you are, and what it is that has befallen you.’” (‘The Beryl Coronet’) 

Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the greatest of all storytellers. He is best known and most enjoyed not for the subtlety of his characterisation or the profundity of his ideas, but as a master of narrative, in many different forms. It is because of his powers as a storyteller that his work not only endures in book form, but continues to captivate television and cinema audiences internationally. The conditions of his own time were propitious for an author with his gift for narrative. He was writing in a period described as ‘the Age of Storytellers’, which was also an age of literature in transition, and of emergent Modernism. We would welcome proposals for 20-minute papers, which consider Conan Doyle’s writing in all these wider contexts, and which might explore:

• Conan Doyle and genre: romance literature, detective fiction, historical fiction, the Gothic, sport, travel, and life-writing etc 

• Narrative and the market: Conan Doyle and publishing history and practice 

• Late-Victorian and early 20th-century shorter fiction 

• Neo-Victorian adaptation: Conan Doyle’s stories in the 20th and 21^st centuries 

• Conan Doyle and narratology 

• Character and action 

• Narrating the Empire: Conan Doyle and colonialism 

• Storytelling and Modernism 

• Conan Doyle’s narrators 

• Stories of Spiritualism and the supernatural 

  Please send abstracts of 200–300 words together with a brief biography to:- james.machin@birkbeck.ac.uk

  Deadline for proposals: - 31 July 2021 

  ‘Conan Doyle and Storytelling’ is hosted in partnership with the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies, and will be the third event associated with a new scholarly enterprise,The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle, sponsored by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Conan Doyle Estate. 

  Further information can be found here.