Shortly after Hound was published, a brief note in the Cambridge Review (January 1902) gave birth to a line of critical commentary that has become known variously as the Great Game or the Grand Game. Frank Sidgwick, a recent Cambridge graduate, wrote an open letter to Dr. Watson (not to Doyle), accusing “Holmes's biographer” of sloppy craftsmanship because some details in the novel did not seem to match with other information in the Holmes stories. The idea of treating the stories as history rather than fiction and assuming that Holmes and Watson were real figures in adventures that actually took place in 1890s England became a pastime for thousands of Holmes devotees and led to a deluge of books and articles known variously as Sherlockiana or Holmesiana.

Ronald Knox and the Great Game

As much of Doyle's early fan mail attests, numerous readers were con-vinced that Holmes really lived and that the stories published in The Strand recounted real adventures, narrated by Holmes's real-life friend Dr. John H. Watson. The limits of treating the stories in this fashion using critical tools available and popular at the time is nowhere better manifested than in Ronald Knox's 1912 essay “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.” Originally delivered as a lecture in 1911 and pub-lished the following year in Oxford University's Blue Book, Knox's essay is a spoof of critical methodologies, notably the Higher Criticism, which had come into vogue during the nineteenth century as a means of decon-structing the Christian Bible. Treating the Holmes stories as a source doc-ument, Knox playfully explores the many inconsistencies among them, attempting to create a chronology of events and a biography of Holmes from evidence scattered across the tales. Knowingly poking fun at the critical tradition rather than at Doyle, he cites as sources a number of ficti-tious authorities including the French critics M. Piff-Pouff and M. Papier Maché and several scholars from Germany (where Higher Criticism first became a prominent methodology) to support his “claims.” There is little doubt Knox was writing tongue in cheek, but in succeeding decades, tak-ing the Holmes canon seriously and trying to resolve “errors” as if one were dealing with a sacred text soon took on a life of its own; its practice became known as the Great Game.

Some early examples of this form of criticism may help illustrate the methods of its practitioners.