The Sherlockian Great Game is the pastime of attempting to resolve anomalies and clarify implied details about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from the 56 short stories and four novels that make up the Sherlock Holmes Canon by Arthur Conan Doyle. It treats Holmes and Watson as real people and uses aspects of the canonical stories combined with the history of the era of the tales’ settings to construct fanciful biographies of the pair.
A popular pastime among fans of Sherlock Holmes is to act as if Holmes and Watson were real people, and to attempt to explain facts about them, either from clues in the stories, by combining the stories with historical fact, or by entirely inventing their own material. Early scholars of the canon included Ronald Knox in Britain and Christopher Morley in New York.
That essay was re-printed, among others, in 1928 and the following year, Sydney Roberts, then a professor at Cambridge University, issued a reply to Knox’s arguments, in a booklet entitled A Note on the Watson Problem. S.C. Roberts issued then a complete Watson biography. A book by T.S. Blakeney followed and the Holmesian “game” (Mrs.Hudson) was on.
In 1934 were founded the Sherlock Holmes Society, in London, and the Baker Street Irregulars, in New York. Both are still active today (though the Sherlock Holmes Society was dissolved in 1937 to be resuscitated only in 1951).
Dorothy Sayers, creator of the detective Lord Peter Wimsey, also wrote several essays on Holmesian speculation, later published in Unpopular Opinions, including an interesting discussion of Watson’s middle name.
The 56 short stories and 4 novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are termed “the canon” by the Holmesians.
While Dorothy Sayers and many of the early “Holmesians” used the works of Conan Doyle as the chief basis for their speculations, a more fanciful school of playing the historical-Holmes game is represented by William S. Baring-Gould, author of Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1962), a personal “biography” of Holmes.
Since 1998, Leslie S. Klinger is currently editing The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library, (Gasogene Books, Indianapolis), which sums up the available Holmesian scholarship alongside the original canonical texts.