Sherlockian game

The Sherlockian game (also known as the Holmesian game, the Great Game or simply the Game; also as the Higher Criticism) 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.

The game of examining the stories as if they were non-fiction began in the early twentieth century. There are early examples of Sherlockian essays by Arthur Bartlett Maurice and Frank Sidgwick, both published in 1902, but neither of these essays received much notice at first. Notable early scholars of the canon included Ronald Knox in Britain and Christopher Morley (founder of The Baker Street Irregulars) in New York. Dorothy L. Sayers, creator of the detective Lord Peter Wimsey, also wrote several essays on Holmesian speculation, later published in Unpopular Opinions. In the foreword to this book, Sayers notes that

The game of applying the methods of the "Higher Criticism" to the Sherlock Holmes canon was begun, many years ago, by Ronald Knox, with the aim of showing that, by those methods, one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible. Since then, the thing has become a hobby among a select set of jesters here and in America.

Sayers also said that the Game "must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere."

When a student at Oxford, Knox issued "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes", an essay which is regarded as the founding text of "Holmesian scholarship". 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 (commonly referred to simply as "the game") was born. Early Holmesians of note include the bibliographer and book collector Vincent Starrett (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes) and the archaeologist Harold Wilmerding Bell.

One aspect of the Game in its traditional form is the effort to resolve or explain away contradictions in the Holmes canon, such as the location of Watson's war wound, which is described as being in his shoulder in A Study in Scarlet and in his leg in The Sign of Four, or his first name, given as John in A Study in Scarlet and "The Problem of Thor Bridge" but James in "The Man with the Twisted Lip".

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.

A more recent "biography" is Nick Rennison's Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography (Atlantic Books, 2005). Since 1998, Leslie S. Klinger has edited The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library (Gasogene Books, Indianapolis), which sums up the available Holmesian "scholarship" alongside the original "canonical" texts.