OT content to let the adventures of Sherlock Holmes rest at a mere sixty stories, thousands of authors have determined to place the Great Detective in every country of the world, meeting every possible person who’s lived from 1860 to 2300, and seeking mystery of every possible concoction, from plausable to positively ridiculous. It seems like an impossible task to keep track of them all.

But that doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t tried.

The other day, I found myself wondering in which pastiche I read of Holmes’ encounter with Oscar Wilde. A standard old Google search proved fruitless. And then I remembered the site called Sherlock Holmes Pastiche Characters (at www.SchoolAndHolmes.com). A work of great effort and obvious devotion,

The site is essentially a listing of historical, fictional and canonical characters appearing, or mentioned in published Sherlock Holmes pastiches, parodies and other Sherlockian writings.

The site owner has thoroughly catalogued some 1200 works, providing everything from plot summaries to exceedingly detailed character appearances, and has even gone so far as to include book covers and a pastiche writer’s dictionary (with “translations” of Americanisms). This is truly an amazing labour of love and dedication.

As for Mr. Wilde, I was absolutely astounded by the number of his appearances in various pastiches. (By the way, it was Nicholas Meyer’s The West End Horror: A Posthumous Memoir of John H. Watson, M.D. that I was trying to remember.)