as Doyle, and he paid Charles Dana Gibson $1,000 apiece for a hundred of his double-page “Gibson girl” drawings. He also, in 1902, hired Norman Hapgood to be the editor, chiefly to take charge of the editorial page and to direct the magazine’s muck-raking coverage of public affairs. Its war coverage, its articles on labour problems, and its exposés of patent medicines gave Collier’s much of its popularity. In 1904 it changed its title from Collier’s Weekly, An Illustrated Journal to Collier’s, The National Weekly.
When the stories of His Last Bow began to appear in 1908, Collier’s published the first two (“Wisteria Lodge” and “The Bruce-Partington Plans”). But the magazine’s interest in fiction was fading, as were its fortunes in general after the death of Peter Collier in 1909, and for the next couple of stories Doyle’s agent returned to the American edition of the Strand: “The Devil’s Foot” and “The Red Circle” in 1911. Later that year one story, “Lady Frances Carfax,” appeared in the American Magazine. Holmes returned to Collier’s for “The Dying Detective” in 1913, “His Last Bow” in 1917, and “The Three Garridebs” and “The Illustrious Client” in 1924. They would be the last of Holmes’s adventures to appear there. The magazine was sold in 1919, suffered financial and production difficulties, but recovered in the 1920s to have reasonable influence in public affairs and reasonable success in publishing such stories as Sax Rohmer’s adventures of Fu Manchu. In 1952–53 it would publish the stories by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr that became the Exploits of Sherlock Holmes. Collier’s ceased publication in 1957.
The stories of The Case-Book, apart from those two in 1924 that were claimed by Collier’s, appeared in two American magazines: four in Hearst’s International from 1921 through 1924, and six in Liberty in 1926 and 1927. Hearst’s International was originally an educational journal (Current Encyclopedia, founded in 1901), and in 1911 was taken over by William Randolph Hearst, who turned it into a public-affairs monthly. Before long it became clear that there was more money in fiction, and the magazine published prominent authors, both American and European. At first it was Hearst’s Magazine, then simply Hearst’s, and from 1921 Hearst’s International. In 1925 it was merged into Cosmopolitan, another title in the Hearst publishing empire (and ancestor of the racy modern magazine for single women).
Liberty, having begun publication in May 1924, was only two years old when it began carrying Canonical stories. Already it was among the three leading weeklies in the United States, having joined Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post in selling more than a million copies of each issue. What it did not do was make money for its proprietors, Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and Joseph Patterson of the New York Daily News. They sold it in 1931; successors kept trying to make it profitable, but gave up and closed the magazine in 1951.
Copyright is literally the right (owned by an author unless it is specifically assigned or sold to someone else) to copy — that is, to publish — an author’s written words. The law of copyright is byzantine and, to most lay people, dull, but even an amateur can learn not to violate copyrights simply by not copying and distributing someone else’s work. The chief exception to copyright protection is known as “fair use” in the United States, “fair dealing” in Britain and Canada. The limits on this exception are complicated and subject to litigation, but it might, for example, allow making a single photocopy of something for private use, or quoting a reasonable passage (300 words is often cited) in an article or book.
In Canada, copyright generally expires 50 years after the author’s death; Doyle’s stories thus were free of copyright in 1980. The same rule formerly applied in Britain, so that his writings were copyright-free (“in the public domain”) from 1980 until 1996. At that time, to harmonize British law with European law, the term was lengthened to 70 years, with the result that Doyle’s work was protected by copyright again from 1996 until 2000.
In the United States, foreign authors, such as Doyle, were unable to claim copyright protection until changes to the law were made in 1891. At that time the term of copyright was 28 years from first publication, renewable for another 14 years. In 1909 the renewal term was extended to 28 years, and there have been several subsequent extensions. For newly published works copyright now lasts until 70 years after the death of the author. However, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 had special provisions for works that had first appeared between 1923 and 1978: if they had not already fallen into the public domain, their term of protection was extended to 95 years from first publication. That category includes ten of the twelve stories in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, and the collection as a whole, which was published in 1927 and so will not enter the public domain until the end of 2022. The result has been that while The Adventures, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and other earlier works are available in dozens of editions — anyone can legally publish them — there continues to be a monopoly on the final stories and therefore on any edition that contains the entire Canon. They can be published only by a company licensed by the copyright owners.
Copyright in most of Doyle’s stories was originally owned by the author and, after his death in 1930, by his estate, which licensed or sold them in various ways. After American copyright law reform in 1976, it became possible for an author’s surviving spouse or children to “recapture” copyrights that had been sold, and in November 1981 Dame Jean Conan Doyle, the only surviving member of Doyle’s family, did that. Since Dame Jean Conan Doyle’s death in 1997, the American copyright in those writings that are not yet in the public domain, including the Case-Book stories, has been the property of her estate. The estate has been managed by Jon L. Lellenberg of Chicago, who reports that as of early 2009, steps are under way to wind up that legal entity and assign the American rights to a new organization to be called the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. To be based in Britain, it will also control some British rights to Doyle’s work, such as copyrights in texts that have never been published. The agent for the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. is to be United Agents (unitedagents.co.uk) of London.
Through the second half of the twentieth century, the copyright owners licensed the firm of Doubleday (also variously known as Doubleday Doran and Garden City Publishing; it is now a division of Random House) to publish The Complete Sherlock Holmes. In recent years several other editions have also been licensed. In addition, Dame Jean also asserted a right to control the use of the characters and names of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson both in print and in other media such as film. Such a right would be based indirectly on common law, intellectual property (copyright and trademark), and unfair competition laws, since a character itself cannot be trademarked. The extent to which such a right is enforceable, allowing the owner to control the writing of new tales using the characters, is legally unclear, but American publishers typically continue to seek permission and pay fees to the estate, and most books that feature “Sherlock Holmes” include a fine-print acknowledgement to that effect.
Meanwhile, the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself had been tangled in litigation among his children and their heirs for decades beginning in the 1950s. A settlement was at last reached shortly before Dame Jean’s death, and by 2004 the assets of that estate had been distributed. There remains, however, “the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate,” operated by Andrea Plunket, the former wife of television producer Sheldon Reynolds. He had first been involved with the use of the Sherlock Holmes characters in the 1950s, and acquired the copyrights from a receiver in bankruptcy in 1974, shortly before their 1980 expiry in Britain and Dame Jean’s “recapture” in the United States. The estate headed by Plunket now maintains a web site (www.sherlockholmesonline.org) and has lawyers who maintain that it owns the American rights to the Sherlock Holmes stories. Such claims have been repeatedly rejected in U.S. federal court decisions in favour of the estate of Dame Jean.
