Kirk, to paraphrase a certain sanguinary Count: Ah, sir, you dwellers in Curmudgeon City cannot enter into the feelings of the enthusiast.

I’m envisioning a series of tales, à la John Gardner’s Moriarty books, in which a library researcher stumbles across evidence of the tangled web of secret criminal adventures and enterprises the respected Power-House president felt necessary to adequately fund his beloved Reptiles division. Why, here is the Mastermind of a literal Buchan-style Power-House!

Laurence Monroe Klauber was the Napoleon of herpetology.

The root problem with a lot of this analytical crap is that you kill the joy with it all–Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, not a metaphor for rape.

Fundamentally, I think a lot of this sort of thing stems from people who are completely untalented, and educated well past the point of their intelligence–So, being frustrated that they can’t produce limpid prose or interesting stories of their own, they feel the need to rape the work of others.

There’s a reason why you see such charity in the reviews of things done by other real authors–They appreciate what goes into art, while the critic is merely a jackass.

Kipling, having a great familiarity with the Indian sub-continent, wouldn’t have. And, because your typical reader of Doyle’s wouldn’t have known any better, Doyle conducted reality triage on researching the details of his story, and just went with it. Nobody called him out on it, either, and he got paid. That’s all that matters to the author–That sweet, sweet financial reward.