Intertextual relations in N. Gaiman’s short story “The Case of Death and Honey”

Abstract

   The paper analyzes the short story “The Case of Death and Honey” (2011) by the renowned English writer Neil Gaiman. This work is a remarkable case of the intertextual dialogue between the contemporary work and the original A. C. Doyle’s series. Our goal is to analyze the features of intertextuality in this story and determine their connection to the message of the story. While carefully and respectfully recreating certain aspects of the original series, Neil Gaiman simultaneously explores the unsaid elements of the plot, such as Holmes’s hobby of beekeeping. At the same time, the author purposefully contradicts the “Holmsians” in several aspects. We have come to the conclusion that the image of Sherlock Holmes becomes less “human” than in the original series, it also deliberately contradicts the message of the Sherlock Holmes story referenced in the text. All contradictions and references result in a message about the immortal nature of A. C. Doyle’s work and its characters, which continue to live on in the works of other authors while still closely related to the original series. In this intertextual connection, we can see the idea of cultural continuity.