Holmes Sweet Holmes, As My Whimsey Takes Me, and Safe as House, or Adventures in Intertextuality
Poe may be the father of the modern detective story, but when mystery writers look to a model on which to base their sleuths, it's not Poe's Dupin they turn to but Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (aka Mel's first literary crush). I'm reareading A Study in Scarlet (the first Holmes novel), a chapter at a time, while also working my way through the first Lord Peter novel, Whose Body, and watching the first season of House, a medical show about diagnostic mysteries. This collision of texts wasn't planned, but it's been a fascinating exercise in literary influence, watching the ideas Doyle introduced mutate and spread.

As many times as I've read ASiS and WB, you'd think I would have noticed how much Sayers owes to Doyle. Sayers' detective is distinctly un-Holmes-like on the surface (deeper similarities crop up in later books) and Bunter makes a much more competent Watson than, well, Watson, but there's the bumbling Scotland Yard detectives, the mysterious body, even a plotpoint that turns on a piece of jewelry (I was momentarily confused when I got to the scene in ASiS where the "old woman" comes for the ring, because I had briefly conflated the pince-nez from WB with the ring). I don't think Sayers deliberately cribbed the entire plot from Doyle, but the influence is there, easy to read when viewed side by side with the original.

It's my understanding that House was deliberately modeled on Holmes (hence the name) -- his mysteries are medical in nature, rather than criminal, but his approach is similar: bring me the facts and I'll sit in my parlor office and solve the case, with the assistance of underlings who I'll rely on to do most of the legwork. Both Holmes and House are superficially cranky and misanthropic, with hidden soft-spots, both are brilliant enough that others overlook their eccentricities because they're so damn good at what they do (and they're both addicted to narcotics). I like the supporting characters on House, and the mysteries are compelling (although I could do without some of the more grisly and graphic medical procedures), but the real attraction is House himself, in all his iconoclastic glory (and it doesn't hurt that he's played by Hugh Laurie).

And now I'm getting the urge to read something even more deliberately derivative - I think I'll pick up Laurie King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice next (even though the second book in that series, when the subtext between Holmes and Mary becomes text, is still my favorite).