However, in the pursuit of pop culture adventures I’ve recently found myself spending some time with Mary Russell, the heroine of a series of books by Laurie R King which also feature Sherlock Holmes as her mentor, and later her husband. Like Holmes, Russell (her preferred moniker) is intelligent, logical, brave, unconventional and excellent at fighting, with a superb aim and a talent for disguises etc etc. She is Jewish, British-American, and studies theology at Oxford. She also dresses in men’s clothes.

What drew me to the books was the fact that Russell is a self-described feminist. Although she mentions her political beliefs in the first book, 1994’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the second is all about feminism. Well, feminism and theology. And murder. It’s even called A Monstrous Regiment of Women. I enjoyed it immensely, despite many silly moments and patchy writing. Incidentally the majority of the writing is pretty good, and I feel that the voice of Holmes rings true most of the time, which is no mean feat.

The author says of the series:

Mary Russell is what Sherlock Holmes would look like if Holmes, the Victorian detective, were a) a woman, b) of the Twentieth century, and c) interested in theology. If the mind is like an engine, free of gender and nurture considerations, then the Russell and Holmes stories are about two people whose basic mental mechanism is identical. What they do with it, however, is where the interest lies.

I find this intriguing, and I’m tempted to read the books again with that genderless mental mechanism in mind. For Holmes, the mind as an engine is his proclaimed ideal; flawless logic and cool rationality. Watson (in Conan Doyle’s A Scandal In Bohemia) famously describes Holmes’ low opinion (and fear?) of those “softer passions” which “might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.”

Of course, it’s Holmes’s human deviation from this mechanical ideal that is often most interesting to readers and fans. (See also: Mr Spock.) Russell is more well-adjusted; that is to say she acknowledges her emotions, and her desire, although grudgingly. Whether this is because she is a woman, because she is a citizen of the 20thC or because we as readers have more access to her thoughts than we do Holmes’s I couldn’t say.

She’s also very androgynous, something I enjoyed reading in a historical setting. But her masculine traits made me wonder if a feminine female Holmes is an impossibility. Would the character be in a permament spasm of contradiction or would they make a better go of reconciling femininity and reason than Holmes seems to be able to? Perhaps Conan Doyle came closer than most himself with Irene Adler, often positioned as Holmes’ female counterpart. While she is formidably intelligent, she is also impulsive, emotional, and sexual.

The thing I found most difficult to deal with, like many readers I suspect, is their May to December romance. When they meet, he is 52. And she is 15. When they marry they are 58 and 21 respectively. And for added creepiness, after their first (awful, awful) kiss: “By God,” he murmured throatily into my hair. “I’ve wanted to do that since the moment I laid eyes upon you.” What is there to say except *vom*?

Thankfully, the first hint of anything sexual between them arrives right at the end of the second book in the series when Russell is 21. Holmes just spends most of the first novel in which she is a teenager stroking her hair in a fatherly fashion. Still, there are some unsettlingly groom-y undertones which means the novels rely very heavily on the reader’s trust in Holmes as the embodiment of honour.

The other bothersome thing for me is Russell’s unavoidable Mary Sue-ness. As well as acting as an avatar for the author (also a Jewish, British-American, feminist theologian) she ticks lots of the boxes: succeeds at everything, is effortlessly friends with everyone, has a dramatic and tragic backstory, no flaws that aren’t endearing, and so on.

Arguably though, as far as being a freakish overachiever goes she is no more of a Mary Sue than Holmes himself. I think there’s a lot of truth in the argument that Mary Sue and her counterpart Marty Stu face double standards, and that successful, powerful female characters are dismissed or undermined through accusations of being a Mary Sue. Rhiannon at Feminist Fiction writes:

…once the words “Mary Sue” have been uttered, all productive conversation is shut down. It says that the character is not worth talking about, not worth analyzing, because she’s somehow incomplete… She’s not a character but a projection of female fantasy, and therefore innately, indisputably bad. Any character who falls into this category might be somewhat one-dimensional, lacking the depth and flaws needed for a really compelling character, but the term goes beyond that, throwing on implications of worthlessness (at best) and a kind of superior disgust at girlish dreams and ambitions (at worst). Because “Mary Sue” only refers to female characters.

Although I picked up the first book because of the fandom, I found myself wishing the Mary Russell books had simply been a series of novels about a feminist woman detective in the early 20thC. I think Russell would make a fine addition to the ranks occupied by Miss Marple and Mrs Bradley, being a little less genteel and younger, more impulsive, and more of an action detective in the manner of Holmes, employing disguises and fisticuffs as necessary. They’re good stories, and although Holmes is in the background I’m not sure he needs to be there at all.

A confession: I write fanfiction.

I’ll let that sink in for a moment, whilst you judge me and leap to all the usual conclusions. At least half of them will be reasonably correct.

For starters, let’s clear up some myths. Fanfiction isn’t about porn. Or, at least, it isn’t all about porn. There are as many different genres out there as there are genres of fiction, as many reasons for reading and writing it as there are readers and writers of it. And it isn’t exactly an obscure pastime; on fanfiction.net (the largest, if most mainstream and therefore frowned-upon collection of fanfic) there are 593,713 fics listed under the Harry Potter category alone.

Image: Jose Carlos Norte, Flickr (jcarlosn)

Here’s one of my favourite quotes about it, used by Sheenagh Pugh in her book The Democratic Genre: Fanfiction in a Literary Context:

It’s always been high praise in Fannish circles to be told that you wrote a story so good it should be published, but sometimes, the highest praise is that it can’t be. Its very uniqueness, what creates it, makes it impossible to be anything else. Lots of people can write stories that fall into readable (more than you think, actually, but I’m flexible on the idea of readable), and many can write stories I’d pay to read, and even some write stories that could be published and be great. But there’s this small, fascinating group that write a story that belongs only to the fandom that created it. It’s like having a treasure you never have to share. It wraps itself in the canon and fanon and the author’s own mind that created it and takes it as its own so perfectly that you are so damn glad you went into that fandom, just grateful, just absolutely thrilled, because you get to read this.

Every fic, without exception, is a product of its fandom. Reading a fic is not just reading a simple story: what you’re actually reading is an intertwining of fanlore, mixing in-jokes and terminology from one particular fandom, as well as from the broader history and narrative of fandom. That’s why they can appear so incoherent and ridiculous to the outside world at times. Fanfiction authors are less writing a story than weaving together a cultural tapestry.

Fanfiction has a proud and noble tradition, as anyone entrenched within the community will tell you. Every student of fanlore knows where the term “ship” arose (X Files fandom), and where the term “slash” arose (Star Trek fandom). We have our own history; from the pre-internet fanzines, to early Usenet groups, right through to the great shipping wars of Harry Potter and the arguments over whether RPF (Real Person Fic; fanfiction about “real” people) is morally acceptable (the earliest known concrete example of RPF comes from the Bronte sisters, who used to write reams of stuff about the fictional country of Gondal. It can be easily argued that there was a huge amount of RPF within the oral tradition, as people passed down stories about folkloric legends such as Robin Hood, King Arthur, and – yeah, I’m going to go there – Jesus). We know our lore and our mythology and our terminology, and we study it as arduously as disciples of any other body of text.

Whilst I do stress that a lot of fanfiction out there is non-sexual and non-romantic in content (it’s called gen fic, yo, look it up), there’s an inarguable trend towards sexytimes. I’m all down with that; I like a bit of story with my porn, and I’m not a very visual person, so fanfiction is where I discovered a lot about myself and my own sexuality. I think I started reading fanfiction when I was about 13 or 14, and nowhere near, ahem, “active”. My first ever ship was Rupert Giles/Jenny Calendar. It was a while after that until I discovered slash, although that discovery was, frankly, inevitable – I had a bit of a sweet-tooth for Harry/Draco (Drarry, if you will). Fanfiction was (and still is!) a safe space to explore my own sexuality, and discover the kaleidoscope of sexualities, genders and identities that are out there. It was many years before I’d hear the name Judith Butler, or even hear the slightest mention of ‘queer theory’, but when I did, none of the ideas seemed particularly new to me.

Whilst there are plenty of male writers of fanfiction (especially within the gaming community – shout out to my little bro!) authorship is overwhelmingly female, and I don’t think that that’s a coincidence. Out in the real world, it’s difficult to own our own sexuality; there’s simply no room for shades of grey. You’re either frigid or a slut; you’re either straight or gay; your sexuality and identity is whatever people perceive when they look at you. But within the fanfiction community, away from the patriarchal mainstream, we can discover and explore how we feel about our own sexual and gender and personal identity. That’s something that I think has had more effect on my life than anything else. Through the medium of fandom, we can find out who we are, and what we like, and how we feel, all through just reading stories together. And then hopefully – eventually – we get to write our own story.

This is people writing because they love it, for no purpose other than writing for themselves and for other people who they vaguely know on the internet. It’s done purely for the joy of the thing. And it isn’t just about the fic itself; the fandom community is the most genre-savvy, theory-aware, innovative group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure to tangle with. This is a community alive with discussion about narrative, metanarrative, referentialism & self referentialism, literary theory, gender and sexuality, social justice, morality, pop culture and in-jokes. I’d also argue that it’s an innately queer community; it not only exists between the cracks, but thrives on the cracks. And in a world where deconstruction and theory are often frowned upon as “thinking about things too much”, fandom is where I found a home.

• Nat Guest is a girl who writes some things for some people some of the time; usually about pop culture, feminism and current affairs. She tweets over-excessively at @unfortunatalie and can play the spoons.