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.
Notable early scholars of the canon included Ronald Knox in Britain and Christopher Morley (founder of The Baker Street Irregulars) in New York.
[3] 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.
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.
Early Holmesians of note include the bibliographer and book collector Vincent Starrett (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes)[8] and the archaeologist Harold Wilmerding Bell.
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.
In the story, Arthur Conan Doyle, an aspiring but struggling author, is caught up in an assassination attempt and is saved by a man exhibiting many of the prototypical characteristics of Holmes.
Some other notable versions of Holmes' parentage: Based originally on the writings of Philip José Farmer, the concept of the Wold Newton family is the construction of a giant genealogical tree which connects many fictional characters to each other and to a number of historical figures.