Elementary Holmes: Fiction's most famous sleuth

DESPITE having been born in Edinburgh in 1859, and studying medicine there for five years, Arthur Conan Doyle managed to avoid ever sending his literary creation Sherlock Holmes to Scotland.

Many other writers have used Sherlock Holmes as a character in their own books in the 80 years since Conan Doyle's death, but while they have taken him much further abroad – to America, India, Tibet and other, even more remote, places – Scotland has remained off the travel itinerary. And this despite the obvious moody attraction of the Highlands as the location for some Hound of the Baskervilles-style chases. Maybe that's something I can remedy in the series of books I'm currently writing, which takes Sherlock Holmes as a 14-year-old and asks what had to happen to him to make him into the dysfunctional character that Doyle invented.

Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is pretty much fully formed in the first story, A Study in Scarlet (1887) and changes little in the 30 years between then and the final story, His Last Bow. He is rigorously logical and analytical, he exhibits wild mood swings, he is obsessed with trivia and detail, he has a pathological distrust of women and he has (whisper it softly) a problem with drugs. These days, he would be diagnosed as having a bipolar, obsessive-compulsive and addictive personality and probably much else besides. In those days he just had to get on with it – and get on with it he did, taking his foibles and quirks and using them to give him an edge as the world's first consulting detective.

In my young adult novel Death Cloud, which comes out next week, I've begun the process of describing how a relatively normal adolescent gets changed (perhaps even warped) by his life experiences into the man we later see. I've also tried to work out where and when he learned some of the many skills that Conan Doyle has him displaying in his adult life – the violin-playing, the boxing at a professional level, the expert sword-fencing, the martial arts … all counterweights to the personality problems that Doyle so carefully built up.

I could, I suppose, have started the first book with a 14-year-old who could already do all these things, but where's the fun in that? It's much more interesting to see him learning these things as he goes along.

Given that Doyle's Holmes seems to be caught between two extremes – the logical, almost scientific, approach to solving crimes and the wild violin-playing and bohemian lifestyle, it seemed obvious to me that Sherlock's personality has been formed by the opposite pull of two strong father-figures in his life. Having got rid of his actual father to India with his regiment at the beginning of Death Cloud, I then have Sherlock falling under the spell of the genial and yet slightly eccentric American Amyus Crowe, who teaches him how to build up solutions to problems from the observation of minute clues. In the second book, Red Leech, I intend introducing a counterweight – the free and easy Irish violinist Rufus Stone. And the stage will then be set for a battle for control of Sherlock's soul.

There have been a couple of attempts to portray an adolescent Sherlock before, of course. The Steven Spielberg-produced 1985 movie Young Sherlock Holmes (or Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear in the UK) had Sherlock already pretty much the way Doyle described him and, worse, had his later flat-mate John Watson turning up many years before they were supposed to have met. And one of their teachers was the evil Professor Moriarty – another character Sherlock was not supposed to encounter until much later. And all this set against a tale of subterranean pyramids hiding Egyptian assassins, blow-darts coated with hallucinogens and bizarre flying machines. It's all too much. By contrast, the 1982 Granada TV series Young Sherlock: The Mystery of the Manor House was much more restrained, with a plot that wouldn't have taxed Enid Blyton too much.

With my Young Sherlock Holmes books I've tried to steer a middle path; portraying Sherlock in a way that is completely consistent with what Doyle did but attempting to put an element of Victorian grotesqueness into plots that are otherwise realistic and properly researched. Time and sales figures will tell whether I've succeeded or not, but the greatest compliment I've had is knowing that the descendants of Arthur Conan Doyle enjoyed Death Cloud and appreciate where I am going with the books and what I am trying to achieve. Which is, by the way, a set of books which can sit on the shelves in front of the authentic Doyle ones and be seen as being part of a larger and cohesive whole.

• Andrew Lane, a lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan, has been chosen by the Conan Doyle Estate to write about Holmes as a teenager. Death Child is published by Macmillan Children's Books, price 6.99.