Preserving the Magic

‘Shall I go on?”

This is the question for all creators of magnificent and popular series of tales. After his third Oz story, L. Frank Baum tried to write other works, some of which, including Queen Zixi of Ix, were mildly successful. But he was forced to keep coming back to the Oz franchise, owing to the failures of his other novels. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the death of Sherlock Holmes in an 1893 story, freeing himself, he thought, from what his literary estate’s website calls “a fictional character that oppressed him and overshadowed what he considered his finer work.” By 1901, public outcry had brought more Holmes.