150 free Sherlock Holmes trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
50 free Sherlock Holmes trivia questions with answers. Sherlock Holmes has been solving crimes since 1887, and this quiz covers the whole case file. The first half sticks to Conan Doyle's canon: the four novels and 56 short stories, Watson's war wound, Mycroft's silent club, Moriarty's academic career, Irene Adler, the hound on the moor, the fall at Reichenbach and the fan rituals that grew up around all of it. The second half turns to the screen, from Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce through Jeremy Brett's Granada series to Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock, the Robert Downey Jr. films, Elementary, Enola Holmes and Mr. Holmes. It suits a pub quiz round, a book club, a classroom unit on detective fiction, or anyone who has ever argued about the best Holmes. Early questions are gentle; the later ones ask for publishers, birthplaces, casting footnotes and the odd real-life criminal. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on Holmes, the individual stories and characters, and each adaptation, and the sentence supporting it appears once you answer. Fifty questions, free, no signup.
30 of 150 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which author created Sherlock Holmes?
Arthur Conan Doyle
Doyle was a practising physician who wrote the first Holmes story while waiting for patients who rarely came.
Q 02In which year did Holmes first appear in print, in the novel A Study in Scarlet?
1887
The debut attracted little notice; Holmes only became a sensation four years later when the short stories began.
Q 03Holmes's debut novel was first published in which magazine?
Beeton's Christmas Annual
Only eleven complete copies of that issue are known to survive, making it one of the most valuable magazines ever printed.
Q 04Alongside four novels, how many Holmes short stories did Doyle write?
56
The short stories are collected in five books, from The Adventures (1892) to The Case-Book (1927).
Q 05Dr Watson was wounded while serving as an army surgeon in which conflict?
Second Anglo-Afghan War
He was invalided home on the troopship Orontes and awarded a pension of eleven shillings and sixpence a day.
Q 06What wounded Watson at the Battle of Maiwand?
A jezail bullet
Doyle was vague about where the wound landed: it is in the shoulder in one story and the leg in another.
Q 07In Doyle's early plot notes, what was Holmes's companion called before he became John Watson?
Ormond Sacker
Holmes himself was pencilled in as Sherrinford in the same notes before Doyle changed his mind.
Q 08Mycroft Holmes spends his hours at which Pall Mall institution, where members may not speak to one another?
The Diogenes Club
Mycroft co-founded it, and it sits conveniently across Pall Mall from his lodgings.
Q 09Which drug does Holmes inject as a seven-per-cent solution?
Cocaine
Both of the drugs Holmes used were perfectly legal in Victorian England, though Watson called the habit his friend's only vice.
Q 10The Reichenbach Falls, where Holmes apparently plunges to his death, are in which country?
Switzerland
The nearby town of Meiringen opened its own Holmes museum in 1991, a year after London's.
Q 11Holmes says he flung Moriarty over the falls using which Japanese martial art?
Baritsu
Doyle apparently misspelled bartitsu, a real Victorian self-defence system that mixed boxing, cane fighting and jujitsu.
Q 12What nickname does Holmes give Professor Moriarty?
The Napoleon of crime
Doyle borrowed the phrase from a Scotland Yard inspector who had used it to describe a real thief.
Q 13Before turning to crime, Professor Moriarty held a university chair in which subject?
Mathematics
His later book The Dynamics of an Asteroid was said to be so advanced that no one in the scientific press could review it.
Q 21Which story did Doyle himself name as his favourite Holmes tale?
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
He ranked The Red-Headed League second when The Strand asked him to list his twelve best in 1927.
Q 22In which 1903 story does Holmes reappear and reveal he faked his death?
The Adventure of the Empty House
It appeared first in the American magazine Collier's, a week before British readers saw it in The Strand.
Q 23What do Holmes fans call the years 1891 to 1894, when the detective was presumed dead?
The Great Hiatus
Q 14Which real-life criminal mastermind helped inspire Professor Moriarty?
Adam Worth
Worth once stole Gainsborough's portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire and kept it hidden for a quarter of a century.
Q 15Where was Irene Adler, the adversary of A Scandal in Bohemia, born?
New Jersey
Some Sherlockians link her to Lillie Langtry, the Jersey-born actress and royal mistress nicknamed the Jersey Lily.
Q 16In A Scandal in Bohemia, what does the King of Bohemia hire Holmes to recover from Irene Adler?
A photograph
The King fears she will send it to the family of his fiancée, a Scandinavian princess, and wreck the match.
Q 17After she outwits him, Holmes always refers to Irene Adler by which title?
The woman
She appears in only one story yet has become one of the most reused characters in Holmes adaptations.
Q 18The Hound of the Baskervilles is set largely on which English moor?
Dartmoor
The story was serialised in 1901-02, before Holmes had officially returned from the dead, so Doyle set it earlier in his career.
Q 19Which journalist supplied Doyle with the legend and local colour for The Hound of the Baskervilles?
Bertram Fletcher Robinson
He explored Devon with Doyle in June 1901 and collected royalties worth over 500 pounds by the end of that year.
Q 20How much was Doyle paid for the full rights to his first Holmes novel?
£25
He had asked for royalties and was refused, a decision the publisher must have regretted for the rest of his life.
Holmes claims to have spent the time travelling in Tibet, Persia and Sudan under the name Sigerson.
Q 24What occupation does the retired Holmes take up on the Sussex Downs?
Beekeeping
He even writes a handbook on the subject, which he proudly shows Watson in His Last Bow.
Q 25Doyle said Holmes was inspired by which Edinburgh surgeon he had once worked for?
Joseph Bell
He was famous for deducing a stranger's trade and travels from a glance, and later wrote an introduction to a Holmes edition.
Q 26Which actor is credited with originating 'Elementary, my dear Watson' in an 1899 stage play?
William Gillette
The same play helped fix the curved pipe and dressing gown in the popular image of the detective.
Q 27On which date do many Sherlockians celebrate Holmes's birthday?
6 January
The year 1854 comes from His Last Bow, where he is described as sixty in 1914; the exact day is fan tradition.
Q 28Which building society at 221 Baker Street employed a secretary to answer letters to Holmes?
Abbey National
When the Holmes Museum was given the 221B address in 1990, the two sides argued for fifteen years over who should get the mail.
Q 29The American backstory of The Valley of Fear is loosely based on which secret society?
The Molly Maguires
The novel's undercover hero is modelled on real Pinkerton agent James McParland, who infiltrated the group in the 1870s.
Q 30Doyle was commissioned to write The Sign of the Four at an 1889 dinner also attended by which author?
Oscar Wilde
The same magazine editor left the Langham Hotel dinner with a promise of The Picture of Dorian Gray.