I joined the Sherlock Holmes Society of London aged 14. A year later, I wrote to my distant relative, the great Basil Rathbone, introducing myself in expectation of numerous autographs and old Universal Studios deerstalkers. He died three days later.

Undaunted by this early disaster, I have been a Holmesian for over 40 years, playing the Sherlock Holmes game that Dorothy Sayers once decreed “should be played as seriously as a county cricket game at Lord’s”.

Which is why I am glad that the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival will be celebrating the great detective twice.

Cleverly, organisers have put together two people engaged in keeping a younger audience in touch with Holmes.

Actor Tim Pigott-Smith (who played Dr Watson in a famous RSC play in the mid-70s and Holmes once on radio) has authored three books chronicling the adventures of the Baker Street Irregulars – the lads who trawled London to help Sherlock; they’re aimed at readers from the age of nine.

He told me that he dreamed up the idea when he was in that play: “The part of Billy, the 221B pageboy, was always alive and full of fun and that’s where it came from. It took a long time to develop, but I wanted to do something about the real world of London in Holmes’s time, gritty street life so the kids always had to look over their shoulders to survive.”

The Dragon Tattoo, The Rose of Africa and The Shadow of Evil are published by Hodder.

The actor will appear with writer Andy Lane in an event on Sunday, March 21. Lane is following a different route to catch the younger reader, with three books about the young Sherlock Holmes himself — he’s 14 in the first one (Death Cloud by Macmillan): “The trick is that Sherlock has to display some of the characteristics of the later man, but not enough that there isn’t room for him to develop; what would a teenager have to go through to turn him into the conflicted person we eventually see?” Lane is happy to tell me that his youthful Holmes has two tutors pulling him in different directions, “…and there has to be a love affair that forever scars him emotionally.”

Three days later, Ruth Rendell, creator of Inspector Wexford and writer of the introduction to a new Penguin edition of the Holmes stories, takes to the Christ Church stage to talk about Sherlock.

I asked her what today’s crime writers owe to Holmes (and, OK, Arthur Conan Doyle!): “Holmes is unique — a glamour figure with a wonderful brain. Nobody else had ever solved things in the way he did. We read him for the intricacies of the plots and, of course, for Dr Watson, who is not the foolish foil he’s often portrayed as. Holmes set the tone, paved the way. And there doesn’t have to be a murder: quite a few of my own books don’t have one.”

The continuing attraction of a character created in 1887 is amazing; the recent huge success of Guy Ritchie’s film is proof of that.

Pigott-Smith remains a huge fan: “Holmes and Watson represent archetypes: you turn to Holmes to help you understand the incomprehensible, and Watson is the man you always want by your side. The characters will always ring true: we shall always need the dark, inexplicable sides of life explained to us.” Andy Lane said:“I was at a jumble sale aged 12 and bought a cheap copy of A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes story. Cue a life-long interest, even obsession.”

And Ruth Rendell?

“I constantly re-read the stories. And I like the way that people still tramp over Dartmoor looking for The Hound of the Baskervilles; I think it’s rather marvellous.”

I couldn’t resist asking her the obvious question: will there be a Reichenbach Falls moment when she kills off Wexford, as Conan Doyle tried to with Holmes? Not quite an exclusive: “There have been rumours that I will kill him for about 15 years! I will retire him in a certain — I hope interesting — way.”

Somebody once wrote that Sherlock Holmes cannot have died: there hasn’t been an obituary in The Times. Oxford will see how he very definitely survives in a few days’ time.

Call the festival box office on 0870 343 1001 or see the festival website at www.oxfordliterary festival.com l See Page 15 for our eight-page supplement on this year’s festival.