In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill Sherlock Holmes.  I say tried, because his attempt at literary homicide (litericide?) was ultimately a failure.  By all rights, it should have succeeded.  As the writer, Doyle held the power to destroy that which he had created.  Holmes, by contrast, was only a make-believe character.  His very existence was subject to the whims and intentions of the man from whose imagination he had sprung.  Doyle should have been able to kill off his fictional detective with a simple stroke of the pen, but thing