WO days ago, I received an email from a poor high school student named Veronica who, working on an assignment about detective fiction, followed some links from this site and became terribly bewildered. The issue, specifically, was this: are the Sherlock Holmes tales fictional, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or was Holmes a real person whose exploits were recorded by Watson and passed along to his literary agent, Conan Doyle? Given the links that she followed, I can see where she might have become confused. It all has to do with The Game.

While I’m sure that many scholars will disagree with this definition (because they are scholars, and disagree for a living…), “the Game” is a playful exercise based upon the premise that Sherlock Holmes was real, that Watson recorded and wrote all the tales, and that any blunders in the sacred writings are not actually errors of editing or memory, but rather clues to things that Watson does not relate. The scholar then uses Holmes’ own methods of deduction and observation to come up with inferences and conjectures that suit the text. For example, at no point in the Canon are we actually told what Dr. John H. Watson’s middle initial stands for. However, in the story The Man with the Twisted Lip, his wife says to a visitor,

“It was very sweet of you to come. Now, you must have some wine and water, and sit here comfortably and tell us all about it. Or should you rather that I sent James off to bed?”

Hmmm… James? Why did she call him James? Some Sherlockians have seized upon this to infer the Scottish version of “James” as his middle initial, that being Hamish. Meanwhile, others have said that she called him James because the name John reminded her of Jonathon Small in the horrible ordeal of The Sign of Four. Of course, the other theories are too numerous to mention.

The point of this game therefore lies in clever debate and the exercise of one’s knowledge of the Canon, including the hundreds (or likely, thousands) of pieces written about the texts, most of which play the Game themselves. The ideas and theories proposed can be outlandish indeed –for example, the famous mystery writer Rex Stout (the creator of Nero Wolfe) once proposed that Watson was a woman– but if these fall in line with the text of the Canon, such innovation can be applauded. Or systematically deconstructed, refuted and ridiculed. Or both.

In short, Veronica, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did indeed write the sixty stories of Sherlock Holmes, but sometimes it’s more fun to play make-believe and pretend he didn’t.