Jul 30, 2025

“engage a special” [FINA] 

This marks the fourth episode in our series of The Apocrypha of Sherlock Holmes — stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that are technically not part of the original Canon. 

"The Story of the Lost Special" was written by Conan Doyle in 1898 about a train that has vanished from the face...

Jul 23, 2025

“play tricks with me and I’ll crush you” [ABBE] 

Was Sherlock Holmes too lenient with how he handled some of the criminals he defeated? There are a number whom he caught and set free, flouting the law in the process.

Inspired by a recent article in The Baker Street Journal, we look at examples in a handful of...

Jul 16, 2025

“another thread which I have extricated out of the tangled skein” [HOUN] 

It has long been accepted that the original title of A Study in Scarlet was meant to be A Tangled Skein. While there is no surviving manuscript of the first Sherlock Holmes story, a single page of notes has long served as Sherlock...

Jul 9, 2025

“put £100 down in front of him” [BLUE] 

Humans are suckers for round numbers. And 100 seems like a perfectly reasonable one to settle on. It's the first three-digit number (in Arabic numbers, that is; Romans were happy to hit a C note).

When it comes to £100 in the Sherlock Holmes stories, it's a figure often...

Jul 2, 2025

“I had painted” [TWIS] 

The Morley-Montgomery Award-winning article we're discussing this month is by H.C. Potter from Vol. 26, No. 2 of The Baker Street Journal.

In it, Potter looks at Watson's prosaic way of setting the scene for us. He selects excerpts from a number of stories to prove his case. Was he...