Next Saturday, August 22, 10 am-4 pm, at the University of San Diego, KPBS will host its annual San Diego Book Festival. The event is free for book lovers of all ages. Attendees will enjoy panel discussions with award-winning authors, activities, live entertainment, exhibitors including local authors, and independent booksellers. I will be manning my book booth, #45, along with a host of other authors in rows cleverly named Writers’ Block. I’d love to meet you at the Festival.

Literature lives. Literature endures. Literature prevails. That’s because readers bestow a special kind of life upon people who have existed only in books. Figments though they may be, literary characters can assume a vitality and longevity that pulse more powerfully than flesh and blood.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s 60 stories about Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective, have been translated into more than 98 languages, from Arabic to Yiddish. Readers everywhere recognize the intrepid sleuth’s deerstalker hat, Inverness cape, calabash pipe, and magnifying glass. Some say that Sherlock Holmes is the most famous man who never lived.

In December of 1887, Sherlock Holmes came into the world unheralded in A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. When, not long after, The Strand Magazine began the monthly serialization of the first dozen short stories titled “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” the issues sold tens of thousands of copies, and the public clamored for more.

At the height of success, however, the creator wearied of his creation. After writing 24 Holmes stories in six years, Doyle yearned for “higher writing” and felt his special calling to be the historical novel. In December 1893, Doyle introduced into “The Final Problem” the arch criminal Professor James Moriarty. In that last story, Holmes and the evil professor wrestle at a cliff’s edge in Switzerland. Grasping each other, sleuth and villain plummet to their watery deaths at the foot of the Reichenbach Falls.

With Holmes destroyed, Doyle felt he could turn his authorial eyes to the romantic landscapes of the Middle Ages. He longed to chronicle the clangor of medieval battles, the derring-do of brave knights, and the sighs of lovesick maidens.

But the writer’s tour back in time would not be that easily booked. Sherlock Holmes had taken on a life of his own, something larger than the will of his creator. The normally staid, stiff-upper-lipped British public was first bereaved. London stockbrokers went to work wearing black armbands in mourning for the loss of their heroic detective. Doyle’s readers became outraged. Citizens poured out torrents of letters to editors complaining of Holmes’s fate. One woman picketed Doyle’s home with a sign branding him a murderer.

The appeals of The Strand’s publishers to Doyle’s sensibilities and purse went unheeded. For the next eight years, Holmes lay dead at the bottom of the Swiss falls while Doyle branched out into historical fiction, science fiction, horror tales, and medical stories. But he wasn’t very good at “higher writing,” and it didn’t sell well.

Finally, Doyle could resist the pressures from publisher and public no more. In 1903 appeared “The Return of Sherlock Holmes,” the series of 13 stories that brought back Doyle’s hero from his violent demise, his logical wonders to perform. Readers again queued up by the thousands to buy the monthly installments, and the author continued writing stories of his detective right into 1927. When, in 1930, Arthur Conan Doyle died at age 71, readers around the world mourned his passing. Newspaper cartoons portraying a grieving Sherlock Holmes captured the public’s sense of irreparable loss.

Such is the power of mythic literature that the creation has outlived his creator. From all over the world letters and packages still come addressed to “Sherlock Holmes” at 221B Baker Street, his fictional home. Well over 300 movies have been made about Holmes than about Dracula, Frankenstein, Robin Hood, and James Bond combined. Sherlock Holmes stories written by post-Doylean authors now vastly outnumber the 60 that Doyle produced. More than 400 Sherlockian societies pay homage to Sherlock Holmes in Great Britain, the U,S., Switzerland, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, and all around the globe.

However many times the progenitor tried to finish off his hero, by murder or retirement or flat refusal to write any more adventures, the Great Detective lives, vigilant and deductive as ever, protecting us from the evils that lurk in the very heart of our so-called civilization. Sherlock Holmes has never died. Readers around the world simply won’t let him.