The Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin has accused Tessa Jowell, the Culture Minister, of "literary snobbery" over her refusal to protect the former home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Ms Jowell's department of culture, media and sport (DCMS) has decided not to give Grade I-listed status to Undershaw, the Surrey home Conan Doyle built for his ill wife and where he wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1902.
An advisory report written for Ms Jowell by English Heritage suggested that the writer does not occupy a "position in the nation's consciousness" as great as that of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling and Charles Darwin, who have all been recognised by the Grade I listing of their homes.
The house was partly designed in 1897 by Conan Doyle himself, along with architect Joseph Henry Hall, and was used by the writer to entertain many literary guests including Bram Stoker and the young Virginia Woolf.
While the fictional home of Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street, London, receives more visitors than Jane Austen's house and the Dickens' House Museum, which are both Grade I-listed, Undershaw has now been turned down for upgrading.
Last night Rankin, the creator of Inspector Rebus, said: "Conan Doyle may not have as great a standing in the universities, but around the world, more people know about, and read Sherlock Holmes, than read Jane Austen.
"He created one of the most recognisable and archetypal figures in literature and if his house is not worth saving, then I would say that no house is worth saving.
"If Conan Doyle does nothing else, he brings a hell of a lot of tourists to the UK.
"We've got problems with the home of Sir Walter Scott and we've only just saved Robert Burns's house, and it's an ongoing thing. We have to fight it all the way. It would appear that there's an element of literary snobbery in this.
"He was too popular a writer to be taken seriously and that's just not the case."
In a letter to the Victorian Society, which is leading the campaign to save the house, the DCMS said its primary reasons for declining the listing were architectural.
"The building lacks the level of special architectural interest which would justify a grade I listing," the letter reads.
"The building's association with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, especially in view of the fact it was not the only property he occupied during his career, is not sufficient to justify a grade I listing on the basis of historical association alone."
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