You haven’t heard of Herlock Sholmes? Let me tell you a bit about him.

Maurice Leblanc created Arsene Lupin, a well intentioned gentleman thief who aided the bumbling police in finding perpetrators of more vicious crimes. In France, Lupin was as well known as Sherlock Holmes was in England. As a competing author of mysteries, Leblanc wrote a collection of these stories in which Lupin outwits another character named Sherlock Holmes to take pot shots at Arthur Conan Doyle. His intention was clearly mockery. Doyle protested, so these series of mysteries were published with the revised name. In Leblanc’s collection, Arsene Lupin faces off against Herlock Sholmes.

A century later Shu Takumi admired the fictional British sleuth, but was unable to gain copyright for usage outside of Japan. He recreated Herlock Sholmes as a video game character. The character dresses and acts like Conan Doyle’s creation. However this is a video game and Herlock Sholmes needs help. Players must correct the deductive errors of this otherwise brilliant detective. The Leblanc estate made no fuss over this use of character’s name.

The same problem occurred with Leblanc’s most famous character, the gentleman thief named Arsene Lupin. He became a favorite character in Japan in the second half of the twentieth century. Hayao Miyazaki (of Studio Ghibli fame) came to public notice as a screenwriter in 1979 with his first full-length movie featuring Lupin the Third, a grandson of Maurice Leblanc’s character. Of course, Lupin the Third, was a polite and skilled cat burglar. The Leblanc estate called foul play at the debut of this character, so the Japanese studio renamed him Wolf, (which is what Lupin means in English), but, he’s still a gentleman thief willing to risk his life to help those in need for a small payment.

Many authors want a ready made character with name recognition. An author who is fond of such a character but has trouble obtaining copyright permission from the family or an author who is mocking the character can morph some one like Sherlock Holmes into a still recognizable name. Both admiration and disdain will produce an imitation. But, adding enough twists and variation from the original can make it our own. That is true even when using a well-known legend, such as King Arthur or Hercules, whose name we can keep for the hero of a story. The more that our ideas shape our variation, the more chance the character has to make a life of his own.

We may have a hearty dislike for people who mock our creation, or who take our ideas to create new forms of income for themselves. But remember, imitation is also a form of flattery.

Photo by K.N. Listman