At 141, Sherlock Holmes Is Still Afoot : Fiction: Fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved detective mark his ‘birthday’--and the legacy of Baker Street’s most famous resident.

Even viewed in silhouette, his identity is obvious. The deerstalker cap and curving calabash pipe belong to Sherlock Holmes, perhaps the most recognizable fictional character of all time.

The Baker Street Irregulars and other organizations of devotees accept Jan. 6, 1854, as Holmes’ date of birth. By their reckoning he will be 141 Friday, but he is apparently immortal.

Sherlockians will tell you the great detective is still in Sussex tending his bees. Some encyclopedias contain separate entries for Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his creator. And nearly 70 years after the last Doyle story, letters are still mailed to the fictional flat at 221B Baker St., London, sent by people believing Holmes to be a real (and living) man.

Against the backdrop of Victorian London, the stories always feature cozy scenes at 221B. At tea time, Holmes and his chronicler, Dr. John H. Watson, are more likely to be enjoying scones served by their dutiful landlady, Mrs. Hudson, than they are to be grappling with the criminal element. Good Englishmen do not miss afternoon tea, even when embroiled in an “adventure.”

Holmes and Watson, to quote the late American author and Holmes expert Vincent Starritt, “live for all that love them well in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic country of the mind where it is always 1895.”

Doyle’s original tales--two novels, two novellas and 56 short stories--were published between 1887 and 1927. Millions worldwide who may have never read a page about the English detective have become familiar with his exploits in more than 180 feature films.

But for those who have thrilled to Holmes’ entreaty, “Come Watson, the game is afoot,” this simply is not enough.

Since Doyle died in 1930, dozens of established authors and scores of aficionados have “discovered” a lost file of Watson’s or otherwise brought to light previously “unknown” cases.

In addition to faithful recreations there have been parodies, stories with time travel or other science fiction plot elements, even a Disney animated film, “The Great Mouse Detective” (based on the book “Basil of Baker Street”). In 1977, writer Richard L. Boyer managed to conjure up an entire novel from an offhand remark Holmes made about a mysterious beast he called “the giant rat of Sumatra.” The book, with that as the title, is still in print from the publisher Armchair Detective.

Although purists may disagree, perhaps the most important contributions to the spirit and memory of Sherlock Holmes have been made by two authors, one American, one English.

August Derleth (1909-1971) of Wisconsin was in college when he wrote his first “Solar Pons” short story. It was meant as tribute to the Great Detective. Solar Pons was a consulting detective, in London, sharing rooms with a medical doctor, Lyndon Parker.

Derleth was delighted when a magazine purchased the pastiche, but envisioned writing only a few more, at most. Over the next four decades he wrote enough Pons stories to fill 10 book-length collections.

Any differences between Holmes and Pons were minor, even accidental. Parker was Watson, complete with mustache. The landlady at 221B Baker St., Mrs. Hudson, became Mrs. Johnson, landlady of 7B Praed St.

In the late 1970s, after Derleth’s death, English author Basil Copper took up the task of bringing further adventures to readers. Copper’s sixth book of previously “uncollected” Pons stories, “The Exploits of Solar Pons,” was published in 1993 by Fedogan & Bremer. Together Derleth and Copper have written twice as much about Pons as Doyle did about Holmes.

But there seems no end in sight to the devotion of writers and readers to Holmes and his clones.

Nicholas Meyer, who began his series of Holmes novels in the 1970s with “The Seven Per-Cent Solution” and “The West End Horror,” added another in 1993, “The Canary Trainer” (Norton).

His motivation: “When I finished reading all the Doyle stories when I was about 14, a feeling of devastation set in--you don’t want them to end,” he says. He also found the copycat Solar Pons versions “strange and unsatisfying.”

Meyer’s late father, a psychoanalyst, gave him ideas about the similarities between psychoanalysis and detective work. In “The Seven Per-Cent Solution,” Sigmund Freud is a central character.

Another 1993 novel, “Sherlock in Love” (Godine) by University of Louisville professor Sena Jeter Naslund, manages to be an affectionate yet clearly revisionist addition to the Holmesian canon, attempting to explain the detective’s misogyny. (Doyle’s Sherlock once said: “Women are never to be entirely trusted--not the best of them.”)

Naslund’s novel invents a failed romance for the super sleuth. It appears Victorian man, even a brainy one, could not cope with an independent-minded woman.