What We Know About Conan Doyle's Next Sherlock Holmes Story

 Ummm . . . nothing. Conan Doyle is deceased and not writing any more stories.

And yet, "What We Know About Conan Doyle's Next Sherlock Holmes Story" is pretty much on par for internet headlines, preying on fan hopes for a new season of BBC Sherlock, that third Robert Downey Jr. Holmes film, anything that will draw a decent number of fingers to mouse-click on the link to their post of "No news here!" of just a quote from someone being asked an obvious question.

"Hey, Michael Keen, head of the Baker Street Irregulars -- Is Conan Doyle going to write a new Sherlock Holmes story?"

"I don't think so. He's dead."

And then the exciting headline follows: "Leading American Sherlockian Reveals Possibility for New Canonical Tale!"

Yes, no possibility is still a statement of possibility.

It's a crime so small that it will probably never have a law against it, a fraud so minor that we don't rank it worthy of shutting down, but stealing moments from people's lives just to get click numbers on your ad-laden web post just by luring them with false hope is kinda evil when you think about it. I have to wonder how much revenue it actually generates for advertisers when people associate their product or service with the disappointment of a nothing story topped with a hoped-for headline. Not something I would want as an advertiser, for sure.

I remember when vacuum-cleaner Sherlockian collectors would clip and paste any mention of Sherlock Holmes in print media in scrapbooks, because everything Sherlock was collectable. But I can't imagine anyone is collecting click-bait stories, unless they're doing a study of the form.

Here's the thing though: "All The Details About The Next Jeremy Brett Sherlock Show," while pure clickbait at the moment, could be an actual thing in the future. The technology exists to map the late Jeremy Brett over Basil Rathbone in Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman to create a "new" Jeremy Brett film. The fraud has the potential of going next level and one day giving us something we hope for, but not in the way we truly hoped for it. The problem is that people are getting more and more used to technology being a magic wish-fulfilling genie (Trust me, I work in IT. They really are.) and the stupidest idea you can think of is going to come up on someone's wish list.

But you don't want to read that AI generated Conan Doyle tale, even if it does have a definite site for Watson's wound and a clear date for the story. We've set a million monkeys to that task already and not gotten Shakespeare out of their keyboard poundings. (Oh, hey, pastiche-writing friends -- you weren't the one I was calling a monkey. That was you-know-who. You're doing great.) And yet, it will be tried.

Hope springs eternal. And therein lies marketing's hopes to take advantage of our hopes as well.