Why it’s daunting: Everyone knows who Sherlock Holmes is, and it seems like everyone has written about him, too. It’s amazing just how much Holmes material is out there. The London sleuth, invented by Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1887 novel A Study In Scarlet, has come to personify the very idea of the private detective who …
An icon of modern British culture and the longest-running science-fiction TV show in history, Doctor Who has never been more popular than it is today, thanks to producer Russell T. Davies, whose revitalization of the series returns this month under the aegis of new producer Steven Moffatt. Matt Smith, taking over the title role from David Tennant, …
Why it’s daunting: The roots of American crime fiction go all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe, but like science fiction, the genre exploded with the pre-World War II rise of the pulps, magazines like Black Mask and Weird Tales, which were printed on cheap paper, and written and published by people who were often after a quick …