[1] Public pressure compelled Conan Doyle to bring the sleuth back to life, and explain his survival after his deadly struggle with Professor Moriarty in "The Final Problem".

On the night of 30 March, an apparently unsolvable locked-room murder takes place in London: the killing of the Honourable Ronald Adair.

Contrary to what Watson believed, Holmes won against Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls, explaining that he spent the next few years travelling to various parts of the world.

At approximately midnight, a sniper, who has taken the bait, fires a specialised air gun, scoring a direct hit on Holmes's dummy.

[3] Glazzard also suggests that the oblique references that Holmes makes about his "missing years" are hints to the explorations of Sven Hedin in Tibet and Francis Younghusband's expedition to that country, and also to pro-British espionage in Mahdist Sudan.

[4] The 1931 film The Sleeping Cardinal (also known as Sherlock Holmes' Fatal Hour) is loosely based on "The Adventure of the Empty House" and "The Final Problem".

Many elements of "The Adventure of the Empty House" were used in the 1939–1946 Sherlock Holmes film series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.

[5] The story was adapted in 1980 as an episode of the Soviet TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson starring Vasily Livanov.

[9] In "The Empty Hearse", the first episode of the third series of Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch which aired on 1 January 2014, Holmes returns to London two years (instead of three) after faking his death.

[12] Another episode in the same series that was also adapted from the story aired on 11 April 1948 (with John Stanley as Holmes and Alfred Shirley as Watson).

It featured Michael Pennington as Professor Moriarty, Frederick Treves as Colonel Moran, Donald Gee as Inspector Lestrade, and Peter Penry-Jones as Sir John.

[17] The story, along with "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax", "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton", and "The Red-Headed League", provided the source material for the 1923 play The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

It is possible that Doyle, who, like Barton-Wright, was writing for Pearson’s Magazine during the late 1890s, was vaguely aware of Bartitsu and simply misremembered or misheard the term, perhaps in part due to Japanese phonology's prohibition on consecutive non-nasal consonants; it may even have been a typographical error, a concern about copyright, or a deliberate alteration to match the aforementioned Japanese phonological pattern.