“I desire you to spare no expense and no pains” [WIST]    Sherlock Holmes had to go places, see people, investigate things. And doing so meant that he incurred expenses. If we itemized what some of these were—absent the...

 “Yes, this is the great Agra” [SIGN]  It's where Jonathan Small met Mahomet Singh, Dost Akbar and Abdullah Khan and together they made a pact known as the Sign of the Four. The Fort of Agra, in the city of the same name.  ...

 “You have been cruelly used” [SPEC]  We're at the end of our four-part series on Women in the Canon from The Best of the Sherlock Holmes Journal, Vol. 2. This time we look at "The Victims."   That may seem a broad topic for a...

"we did not meet to talk about the cut of my socks" [3GAR]    When you think of attire in the Sherlock Holmes stories, the mind usually turns to the deerstalker and Inverness, and perhaps Sherlock Holmes's disguises.   But what about...

 "Have you the dates of those letters?" [HOUN]  The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of Sherlock Holmes's most famous cases. But what can we say about the date of the case? Watson never specifically mentions a date, but many chronologists...

"something further from Brook Street" [RESI]  When Percy Trevelyan went to open up his practice, he found that he had more in brains than he did in his pocketbook. Until a shrewd businessman came along and made a business proposition that suited...

"forbear from crossing the moor in those dark hours" [HOUN]     One of the most iconic characters in the Sherlock Holmes stories is not a character at all. It's Dartmoor. As Holmes himself said of it, "Never been there? Ah, well, I...

  "Title and money—who could carry them better than she?" [ABBE]    We've investigated which women were influential in their own right in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and then those who had to work for a living. Next up, we...

"Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession" [SPEC]   When he was facing off against Dr. Grimesby Roylott, Sherlock Holmes asserted "When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has...

"Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero," [FIVE]  Sherlock Holmes called Professor Moriarty "a genius, a philosopher, and abstract thinker" in "The Final Problem." But what did Holmes know about philosophy? According to Watson's...