Dakota and Svetlana are in Good Company
A recent survey of teens in Great Britain by the newspaper The Telegraph came out with some interesting results. Of the respondents, only 25 percent believed that Sir Winston Churchill really existed.
On the other hand, many more respondents believed certain fictional characters had actually lived. For example, "Sherlock Holmes, the detective, was so convincingly brought to life in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novels, their [sic] film versions and television series, that 58 percent of respondents believe that the sleuth really lived at 221B Baker Street."
The Troublemaker: the homepage for Dakota Stevens Investigations.
This fact caught my eye because yesterday I received an email from a private investigator in Houston, Texas asking Svetlana Krüsh, my fictional detective's fictional Gal Friday, if she would be open to a link exchange. Here's his email. Here's "Svetlana's" reply. And here's a PDF of the PI's links page so you can see his description of Dakota's site.
Over the past couple of years, since I first launched Dakota & Svetlana into the cyber-ether, I've had several people in emails or on websites thinking they were real people. Take this chess blog entry, for example. I felt bad, so I finally had to intercede and tell them the truth.
A chess club thought this was Svetlana Krüsh.
I've also received 10-12 requests from people for advice on their cases. (I wish I'd saved those emails. I lost them when I changed accounts.) The most memorable of these came from a desperate husband who believed that his wife was not only stepping out on him, but also prostituting their daughter. Ouch! He wanted to know if this was a case that "Dakota" would be interested in. "Dakota" considered it and said to himself, "Fuck that." My fictional PI replied that the man should probably go to the police.
Aside from the people in pain part, this is exactly what I was hoping for when I created these two characters. They're real to me, so if others think so, that's great. With this in mind, I'd love for two people to have a conversation someday similar to one I once had with my step-grandfather Cecil.
Back when I was 13, I read the Sherlock Holmes stories in their entirety. At the time, I was visiting Cecil in Vinalhaven, Maine, and the conversation somehow drifted to Sherlock Holmes. I went on and on about the stories and how much they meant to me and how I wanted to create a detective like him someday. Yada, yada, yada. The maunderings of an eager 13-year-old.
Anyway, Cecil interrupted and said the following (in a thick Downeast accent):
"Yessir, I remember my teacher tellin' us bout all those cases that there Sherlock Holmes was solving. Boy, he was one smart fella, wasn't he, Chris?"
"Uh, Cecil...you realize he's a fictional character, right?" I said. "He was made up. All of it."
Cecil gave a start in his chair like he'd just seen a ghost.
"You don't say!"
"They were all stories, Cecil," I said. "Every word was make-believe."
Now, even though Cecil had limited education, he's no dummy. He believed that Holmes and Watson existed because his teacher probably gave him that impression. Anyway, he's no worse off than the 58 percent of those Britons I mentioned above.
It's nice to know that Dakota and Svetlana are in good company.