1 Novel, 2 Novels, 3 Novels...

Literary historian Franco Moretti and a cadre of grad students are currently engaged in an enormous project to count novels and thereby better understand how market forces create and destroy genres of literature:

Sherlock Holmes, for example, was not the only detective in Victorian popular literature, nor even the first. So why is it that we still read his adventures, and not those of his competitors? Moretti and his team looked at the work of Conan Doyle’s rivals. While clues and deductions were scattered around in their texts, the authors were often a bit off about how they were connected. (A detective might notice the clues, then end up solving the mystery through a psychic experience, for example.)

Clearly the idea of solving a crime by gathering clues and decoding their relationship was in the air. It was Conan Doyle’s breakthrough to create a character whose “amazing powers” were, effectively, just an extremely acute version of the rational powers shared by the reader. But the distinctiveness of that adaptation only comes into view by looking at hundreds of other texts in the literary ecosystem.