The great legacy that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle left us through is most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, includes many things. Aside from suspiciously vague monographs and a global market in deerstalker hats and magnifying glasses, perhaps the oddest is something called the Sherlockian Game. This is not a board game (though “Clue: Holmes Edition” sounds profitable). It’s a fandom tradition dating back nearly a century where readers treat Doyle’s stories as literal history. In the Sherlockian Game, Holmes and Watson were real men, Doyle was merely Watson’s literary agent, and our job is to sort out all the contradictions as though this were a doctoral dissertation rather than pulp fiction. It’s scholarship, cosplay, and trivia night all rolled into one.

The Sherlockian Game (also known as “The Great Game”) has since blossomed into a global pastime, sparking fan theories, spawning endless debates, and even—by accident—echoing concepts modern mathematicians call game theory. All that from a narrator who couldn’t remember if he took a bullet in the shoulder, the leg, or in his imagination.

What Is the Sherlockian Game?

The Sherlockian Game is the long-running pastime of treating Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories not as fiction, but as if they were historical records written by Dr. Watson. In this tradition, Doyle is reimagined as Watson’s “literary agent,” and every inconsistency, error, or stray detail in the canon becomes a puzzle to be solved rather than an author’s oversight.

Participants in the Game comb through the stories with mock-serious scholarship, asking questions Doyle never meant to answer: How many times was Watson married? How was he injured in Afghanistan? When exactly was Holmes born? The fun comes from elevating these incidental details into essential truths, treating contradictions as mysteries waiting for a detective’s logic. In short, it’s equal parts literary criticism, imaginative world-building, and tongue-in-cheek obsession—all played with the utmost seriousness.

The Sherlockian Game: Origins of Taking Fiction Way Too Seriously

The Sherlockian Game began with Ronald Knox’s tongue-in-cheek essay, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” (1928). His rules: play seriously, treat every story as fact, and reconcile contradictions with earnest scholarship.

He introduced the concept with these words: “If there is anything pleasant in life, it is doing what we aren’t meant to do. If there is anything pleasant in criticism, it is finding out what we aren’t meant to find out. It is the method by which we treat as significant what the author did not mean to be significant, by which we single out as essential what the author regarded as incidental.”

In other words, he was giving the official permission slip for what Sherlockians were already itching to do: ignore Conan Doyle’s intentions and go spelunking in the narrative cracks. Doyle meant for Watson’s limp to be a minor detail? Perfect—let’s make it a medical mystery worthy of a dozen journal articles. Doyle tossed out a casual reference to Holmes’s university days? Clearly that was an invitation for scholars to write doctoral-length arguments about Oxford rowing schedules versus Cambridge lecture calendars.

This is the very engine of the Sherlockian Game: elevating the incidental to the essential. Instead of worrying about the big picture (say, who killed the guy in the locked room), Sherlockians gleefully obsess over the scraps Doyle himself barely remembered. In other words, the fun isn’t in reading what Doyle wanted us to notice—it’s in discovering what he never intended to matter and then acting as though civilization itself depends on sorting it out.

Dorothy L. Sayers endorsed the approach, warning that the Game must be played “as solemnly as a county cricket match.” Translation: no clowning around, even though we’re basically writing footnotes about a guy who faked his own death for two years just to dodge fan mail.

Aficianados of the Sherlockian Game have elevated nitpicking into high art. What most readers would call “continuity errors,” the Sherlockian Game declares as tantalizing mysteries. What most authors would sweep under the rug, Sherlockians pin to the wall with red string and connect like a Victorian conspiracy theorist. It’s the literary equivalent of noticing that Howard Hughes ordered chocolate chip cookies in a scene from The Aviator about ten years before chocolate chip cookies were invented, and writing a 40-page thesis about the role of chocolate in aerodynamics.

Since then, writers like William S. Baring-Gould and Leslie Klinger have expanded the Game into near-academic tomes. Baring-Gould even produced a full “biography” of Holmes, calculating birthdays, educational records, and probably the caloric intake of his Baker Street breakfasts. If Holmes had lived to see it, he’d likely mutter, “Data, Watson—data. And possibly a restraining order.”

Canonical Contradictions: When Doyle’s Pen Slipped

Sherlock Holmes may have been the master of logic, but his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, occasionally played a little loose with the facts. That looseness is the lifeblood of the Sherlockian Game. Every contradiction, inconsistency, or baffling detail is an invitation to treat Doyle’s oversight as a mystery worth solving. And no one suffers more from these slips of the pen than Dr. John H. Watson.

The Case of the Migrating War Wound

In A Study in Scarlet, Watson tells us he was wounded in the shoulder during his service in Afghanistan. So far, so good. But by The Sign of Four, he’s limping on a bum leg from—apparently—the very same injury. Either Watson was the first victim of the meandering single bullet that later perplexed JFK conspiracy theorists, or Doyle misplaced his notes. The Sherlockian Game refuses to accept “authorial error” as an answer, so explanations abound: perhaps Watson sustained multiple wounds; perhaps his limp was psychosomatic; or perhaps he liked embellishing his war stories to keep Holmes impressed. Whatever the explanation, Watson’s medical records are as tantalizingly elusive as the missing eighteen and a half minutes from the Watergate tapes.

The Mystery of the Many Mrs. Watsons

Watson’s marital status is as stable as Holmes’s violin strings. In The Sign of Four, he marries Mary Morstan, only to refer in later stories to being a widower. Yet, curiously, in other tales he’s described as still married—or even remarried. In “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” Holmes casually mentions Watson’s “second wife,” which fans have treated like the Rosetta Stone of marital confusion. Depending on the theory, Watson had one wife (Mary, inconsistently referenced), two wives (Mary plus an unnamed spouse), or three (because at this point, why not?). Either Doyle couldn’t keep track, or Watson was as quietly addicted to spouses as Holmes was to cocaine.

How Old Was Holmes, Anyway?

Even the great detective’s birthday is up for grabs. William S. Baring-Gould, in his monumental “biography,” placed it on January 6, 1854—fitting, since Holmes occasionally displayed the crankiness of someone born in the bleak midwinter. Other scholars suggest 1868, which would make him startlingly young during some of his earliest cases. The truth may be forever lost, but the debate keeps the Game alive. After all, what better birthday present for Holmes than endless arguments about when he was born?

The Curious Case of Mrs. Hudson

Mrs. Hudson, Holmes and Watson’s long-suffering landlady, is another puzzle. In some stories she’s clearly named and indispensable, ferrying in meals and tolerating chemical experiments that probably voided her homeowner’s insurance. In others, the role of caretaker is attributed to different names altogether. Is Mrs. Hudson a single individual, or a rotating cast of landladies Doyle carelessly swapped in and out? The Sherlockian Game, naturally, insists on the former—and then sets about explaining away the inconsistencies with genealogies, aliases, or even elaborate theories involving sisters and cousins. Landlady by day, enigma by night.

The Timeline That Wasn’t

Doyle never bothered to create a consistent timeline for Holmes’s cases, and it shows. Stories are set in contradictory years, sometimes referencing events that couldn’t possibly overlap. The result is a chronology so tangled that attempting to sort it out makes string-theory physics look straightforward. But for players of the Sherlockian Game, that’s half the fun: the challenge of creating charts, calendars, and spreadsheets to force Doyle’s chaos into something resembling order. Whether or not Holmes solved the Baskerville case before or after returning from the dead is less important than proving you can make the puzzle fit.

Moriarty: The Professor of Crime (and Math, and Asteroids)

Professor James Moriarty is remembered as the Napoleon of crime, but Doyle also gifted him a couple of bizarre academic footnotes. We’re told he authored a treatise on the Binomial Theorem and another ominously titled The Dynamics of an Asteroid. On the surface, this sounds like the CV of a harmless mathematics professor who occasionally gets invited to conferences in Vienna, not a criminal mastermind plotting in the shadows of London.

The Sherlockian Game, naturally, refuses to take these references at face value. The Binomial Theorem essay suggests Moriarty had the kind of obsessive brain that could turn algebra into a criminal empire—perhaps hiding secret codes in his formulas or running numbers not just in theory, but for blackmail ledgers. And The Dynamics of an Asteroid? That single title has launched more speculation than Holmes’s entire casebook. Fans have suggested it contains revolutionary physics, coded instructions to his criminal network, or even predictions about orbital mechanics that would have made Isaac Newton sweat. Some playful theorists go further, proposing Doyle inadvertently gave Moriarty credit for anticipating Einstein.

Most likely, Doyle just tossed in “Binomial Theorem” and “Asteroid Dynamics” because they sounded brainy enough to impress readers and scary enough to make Moriarty more than a one-note villain. But for the Sherlockian Game, those scraps are irresistible. If Doyle called it “incidental,” we’ll call it essential. And so the fandom has turned Moriarty into not just a Napoleon of crime, but also a Galileo of the underworld—a man whose equations were as dangerous as his plots.

In short, the canon’s contradictions aren’t problems to be ignored—they’re opportunities to be explored. Where casual readers see slip-ups, the Sherlockian Game sees mysteries. And if solving them requires giving Watson three wives, relocating his war wound, and rebranding Moriarty as a mathlete gone bad, so be it. Elementary? Hardly. But endlessly entertaining.

Great Game Spotlight: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution

For an example of the Sherlockian Game on expert mode, consider The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. First appearing as a 1974 novel and adapted in 1976 into a movie, Nicholas Meyer presents a “recently discovered” Watson manuscript. It reveals that the Great Hiatus (the span between Holmes’ supposed death at Reichenbach Falls and his surprise return a few years later) was Watson’s tactful way of hiding an embarrassing truth about his closest friend.

We learn that the almighty Professor Moriarty isn’t a spider at the center of any web—he’s a perfectly harmless math tutor. Holmes’s obsession with the man? Not criminal insight, but cocaine-fueled paranoia, and a personal dislike of the man because he had an affair with Holmes’ mother when Sherlock was a young boy. We also get a visit from Sigmund Freud to detox our favorite detective violinist and unpack the childhood baggage Holmes never scheduled time to examine between cases.

The Plot in Sixty Seconds

• Watson and Mycroft stage an intervention and whisk a strung-out Holmes to Vienna.
• Freud treats Holmes’s addiction and probes the psychological roots of his fixations.
• Moriarty is recast as a non-villain, upending the canonical “arch-nemesis” narrative.
• The Reichenbach drama and the “empty house” return are reframed as misread, misreported, or strategically embellished episodes.

Why This Is Peak Sherlockian Game

• Incidental → Essential: A throwaway detail—Holmes’s drug use—becomes the engine that reinterprets everything else.
• Canon as Puzzle: The novel treats Doyle’s stories like historical records to be corrected, not fiction to be followed.
• Watsonian Frame: By adopting Watson’s voice and “lost manuscript” framing, it invites us to read the book as recovered truth rather than pastiche.
• Continuity Surgery: Contradictions aren’t errors; they’re clues that justify new timelines, motives, and character arcs.
• Play It Straight: The tone is mock-scholarly and utterly sincere—exactly how the Sherlockian Game says we must play.

The Takeaway

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution doesn’t just add a chapter to Holmes; it demonstrates the Sherlockian Game’s prime directive: treat the incidental as essential, reconcile the “facts,” and produce a version of events so plausible that you start wondering whether Doyle was merely Watson’s long-suffering literary agent after all.

Fan Theories and the Expanding Sherlockian Universe

Once the Sherlockian Game caught on, it didn’t stay confined to stuffy essays. The internet and social media launched theories so wild Doyle would have thrown his pipe across the room. For example:

• Holmes was Jack the Ripper: The crimes overlap with Holmes’s career, and his intimate knowledge of London’s underworld would have given him opportunity. Never mind that Holmes abhorred violence—some fans argue the best way to explain why he never caught the Ripper is that he was busy being him.
• Holmes was Van Helsing and Moriarty was Dracula: The timelines of Stoker’s and Doyle’s works overlap, and both feature shadowy masterminds, eerie nights in London, and plenty of fog. If Holmes was moonlighting as a vampire hunter, it would explain his odd hours, pale complexion, and occasional bursts of melodrama. We explored this vampiric theory in this article: “Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula: The Compelling Theory of the Vampiric Sherlock Holmes Crossover“.
• Irene Adler as the superior detective: Adler consistently outsmarts Holmes in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and unlike him, she manages it without the benefit of sidekicks, disguises, or cocaine. Fans see her as the one person who could out-deduce the great detective—and then leave him speechless to boot.
• Moriarty as Holmes’s alter ego: The symmetry between them—their intellect, their secrecy, their obsession with each other—has led to readings that they are two halves of the same psyche. It’s the ultimate case of detective vs. shadow self, and Freud would’ve had a field day with it.
• Watson as unreliable narrator: The stories come to us entirely through Watson’s pen, so any exaggeration, misdirection, or accidental mix-up becomes canon. This theory suggests Watson inflated Holmes’s brilliance (and fudged details like his own injuries) to craft a better story—and maybe a better version of himself.

The Sherlockian Game encourages this kind of theorizing. Whether or not the ideas are convincing is irrelevant; what matters is that they keep the Game alive—and guarantee heated arguments in comment sections until the end of time.

Sherlockian Game Theory: Holmes vs. Moriarty, Victorian Edition

If you are at all familiar with game theory, it might surprise you to learn that all of this extra-canonical stuff played a role in inspiring its creation. A Scientific American article explains that mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern—founders of modern game theory—were intrigued by Holmes’s flight from Moriarty in “The Final Problem,” and used that scenario as a case study in strategic decision-making. They even concluded that, mathematically speaking, “Sherlock Holmes is as good as 48% dead when his train pulls out from Victoria Station.”

Here’s how it breaks down: Holmes jumps onto a train bound for Dover, but changes course and disembarks at Canterbury—anticipating that Moriarty might expect him to head straight to Dover. Moriarty, stuck behind, must choose between stopping at Canterbury or continuing on. Holmes faces the same dilemma: staying on to Dover or getting off at Canterbury. Each decision has consequences: mutual arrival in Dover spells doom for Holmes, while splitting paths maximizes his survival. Using payoff values (positive for Holmes, negative for Moriarty), von Neumann and Morgenstern showed that neither man has a guaranteed winning move—only an optimal probabilistic mix.

Their math concluded that the best strategy for Holmes is to leave the train at Canterbury with a 60% probability, and continue to Dover 40% of the time—while Moriarty should mirror that logic with reversed odds. Done correctly, Holmes’s chance of slipping away climbs to about 52%. And here’s the kicker: although Doyle didn’t know game theory existed, Holmes’s actual choice—getting off at Canterbury—fits this probabilistic optimal strategy. Was it a lucky guess by Doyle, Holmes’s intuition, or cosmic alignment? The Sherlockian Game doesn’t care: it’s all grist for the analytical mill.

The Sherlockian Game as Fandom Scholarship

The Sherlockian Game also marks one of the first examples of fandom behaving like academia. Before Trekkies translated the Bible into Klingon and Star Wars fans made dissertations on the politics of Coruscant, Holmes devotees were producing annotated texts, debating university affiliations, and holding meetings where grown adults argued about whether Watson’s dog had a middle name. Scholars of fan culture point to the Game as proto-fan studies: proof that obsession plus creativity equals something resembling scholarship (or madness, depending on your perspective).

Why We Keep Playing the Sherlockian Game

Why is the Sherlockian Game still going strong in 2025? Because contradictions are catnip. Because arguing about whether Watson had three wives is more fun than doing your taxes. Because the stories are so good that we want them to be more real than real life. And maybe because Holmes himself, with his smug deductions and questionable fashion sense, begs to be challenged by those who love him best.

Conclusion: The Game Is Always Afoot

The Sherlockian Game proves that fandom isn’t new—it’s just better organized now that we have Wi-Fi. It also proves that even a Victorian detective can spawn debates about continuity, inspire crackpot theories, and help foreshadow the serious science of game theory. The fact that none of us can agree on anything? That’s the most game-theoretic outcome of all.

So pick a side: was Watson a terrible self-editor, was Holmes actually Moriarty, or was Irene Adler running the whole show? Join the Sherlockian Game and play as seriously as you dare. After all, as Holmes himself never quite said: “The Game is afoot—and occasionally limping, depending on which leg Watson injured this week.”

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