Yes, detective fiction can sometimes be immensely popular. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle “killed” Sherlock Holmes in an 1893 story because he felt he “had such an overdose of” the detective, his admirers were outraged and inconsolable. Over 20,000 readers left The Strand Magazine, where the Sherlock Holmes stories were published. And Conan Doyle had to orchestrate “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” 10 years later. Holmes, certainly, “has enjoyed the most vigorous afterlife of any fictional character”, as adaptation scholar Thomas Leitch not