<P> Widely considered a British cultural icon, the London Metropolitan Railway named one of its 20 electric locomotives deployed in the 1920s for Sherlock Holmes . He was the only fictional character so honoured, along with eminent Britons such as Lord Byron, Benjamin Disraeli, and Florence Nightingale . </P> <P> A number of London streets are associated with Holmes . York Mews South, off Crawford Street, was renamed Sherlock Mews, and Watson's Mews is near Crawford Place . </P> <P> The popularity of Sherlock Holmes has meant that many writers other than Arthur Conan Doyle have created tales of the detective in a wide variety of different media, with varying degrees of fidelity to the original characters, stories, and setting . According to The Alternative Sherlock Holmes: Pastiches, Parodies, and Copies by Peter Ridgway Watt and Joseph Green, the first known period pastiche dates from 1893 . Titled "The Late Sherlock Holmes", it came from the pen of Doyle's close friend, J.M. Barrie, who was to create Peter Pan a decade later . A common take is creating a new story fully detailing an otherwise - passing canonical reference (such as an aside mentioning the "giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared" in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire"). Other adaptations have seen the character taken in radically different directions or placed in different times or even universes . For example, Holmes falls in love and marries in Laurie R. King's Mary Russell series, is re-animated after his death to fight future crime in the animated series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, and is meshed with the setting of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos in Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" (which won the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Short Story). An especially influential pastiche was Nicholas Meyer's The Seven - Per - Cent Solution, a 1974 New York Times bestselling novel in which Holmes's cocaine addiction has progressed to the point of endangering his career . It was made into a film of the same name in 1976 and popularised the pastiche - writing trend of introducing clearly identified and contemporaneous historical figures (such as Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, or Jack the Ripper) into tales featuring Holmes, something Conan Doyle himself never did . </P> <P> In addition to the Holmes canon, Conan Doyle's 1898 "The Lost Special" features an unnamed "amateur reasoner" intended to be identified as Holmes by his readers . The author's explanation of a baffling disappearance argued in Holmesian style, pokes fun at his own creation . Similar Conan Doyle short stories are the early "The Field Bazaar", "The Man with the Watches", and 1924's "How Watson Learned the Trick", a parody of the Watson--Holmes breakfast - table scenes . The author wrote other material, especially plays, featuring Holmes . Much of it appears in Sherlock Holmes: The Published Apocrypha, edited by Jack Tracy; The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Peter Haining, and The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes, compiled by Richard Lancelyn Green . </P>

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