Sherlock Holmes Trivia
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189 free Sherlock Holmes trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 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 189 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which musical instrument does Sherlock Holmes play?
Violin
Holmes plays the violin; in 'The Cardboard Box' he says he bought his Stradivarius from a broker in Tottenham Court Road for fifty-five shillings.
Q 02In which year did Holmes first appear in print, in the novel A Study in Scarlet?
1887
A Study in Scarlet was published in 1887 and attracted little notice; Holmes only became a sensation four years later, when the short stories began in 1891.
Q 03Holmes's debut novel was first published in which magazine?
Beeton's Christmas Annual
A Study in Scarlet appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual, a one-shilling paperback; only about eleven complete copies of that issue are known, making it one of the most valuable magazines ever printed.
Q 04Alongside four novels, how many Holmes short stories did Doyle write?
56
Doyle wrote 56 Holmes short stories, collected in five books from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) to The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927).
Q 05Dr Watson was wounded while serving as an army surgeon in which conflict?
Second Anglo-Afghan War
Watson was wounded in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, invalided home on the troopship Orontes and granted a pension of eleven shillings and sixpence a day.
Q 06What wounded Watson at the Battle of Maiwand?
A jezail bullet
A jezail bullet, fired from a long-barrelled Afghan musket, struck Watson at Maiwand in 1880; his orderly Murray saved him by throwing him across a packhorse.
Q 07In Doyle's early plot notes, what was Holmes's companion called before he became John Watson?
Ormond Sacker
Doyle's plot notes called the narrator 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
The Diogenes Club, which Mycroft helped found, bars members from speaking except in the Stranger's Room; it stands in Pall Mall opposite Mycroft's lodgings.
Q 09Which drug does Holmes inject as a seven-per-cent solution?
Cocaine
Holmes injects cocaine; Watson opens The Sign of the Four by asking 'Which is it today, morphine or cocaine?', and both drugs were legal in Victorian England.
Q 10The Reichenbach Falls, where Holmes apparently plunges to his death, are in which country?
Switzerland
The Reichenbach Falls are in Switzerland, in the Bernese Oberland; Doyle visited them in 1893 and chose them as the scene of Holmes's apparent death in 'The Final Problem'.
Q 11Holmes says he flung Moriarty over the falls using which Japanese martial art?
Baritsu
Holmes tells Watson he escaped Moriarty's grip through baritsu, 'the Japanese system of wrestling'; Doyle apparently misspelled bartitsu, a real self-defence method Edward Barton-Wright taught in London from 1898.
Q 12What nickname does Holmes give Professor Moriarty?
The Napoleon of crime
Holmes calls Moriarty 'the Napoleon of crime' in 'The Final Problem', echoing a phrase Scotland Yard's Robert Anderson had used of a real master thief.
Q 13Before turning to crime, Professor Moriarty held a university chair in which subject?
Mathematics
Q 21In 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 22What do Holmes fans call the years 1891 to 1894, when the detective was presumed dead?
The Great Hiatus
Sherlockians call 1891–94 the Great Hiatus; Holmes claims to have spent it travelling in Tibet, Persia and Sudan as a Norwegian explorer named Sigerson.
Q 23What occupation does the retired Holmes take up on the Sussex Downs?
Beekeeping
Moriarty won a mathematics chair at a small university on the strength of a treatise on the binomial theorem; his later The Dynamics of an Asteroid was said to be beyond any reviewer in the scientific press.
Q 14Where does Holmes's index record that Irene Adler was born?
New Jersey
Holmes's index lists Irene Adler as born in New Jersey in 1858; some Sherlockians link her to Lillie Langtry, the Channel Islands actress and royal mistress nicknamed the Jersey Lily.
Q 15In A Scandal in Bohemia, what does the King of Bohemia hire Holmes to recover from Irene Adler?
A photograph
The King wants a photograph of himself with Irene Adler, which he fears she will send to the family of his fiancée, a Scandinavian princess, and wreck the match.
Q 16After she outwits him, Holmes always refers to Irene Adler by which title?
The woman
To Holmes she is always 'the woman'; Irene Adler appears in only one story yet has become one of the most reused characters in Holmes adaptations.
Q 17The Hound of the Baskervilles is set largely on which English moor?
Dartmoor
Baskerville Hall stands on Dartmoor in Devon; the novel was serialised in 1901-02, before Holmes had officially returned from the dead, so Doyle set it earlier in the detective's career.
Q 18Which journalist supplied Doyle with the legend and local colour for The Hound of the Baskervilles?
Bertram Fletcher Robinson
Bertram Fletcher Robinson, a journalist friend of Doyle, told him the West Country legend of a spectral hound and toured the moor with him in 1901; Doyle thanked him in the book's dedication.
Q 19How much was Doyle paid for the full rights to his first Holmes novel?
£25
Ward, Lock & Co. paid Doyle £25 for the full copyright of A Study in Scarlet after refusing his request for royalties, warning that the market was flooded with cheap fiction.
Q 20Which story did Doyle himself name as his favourite Holmes tale?
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
Doyle put 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band' first when The Strand asked him in 1927 to list his twelve best Holmes stories.
Holmes takes up beekeeping in retirement on the Sussex Downs and in His Last Bow proudly shows Watson his Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, 'the fruit of my leisured ease'.
Q 24Doyle said Holmes was inspired by which Edinburgh surgeon he had once worked for?
Joseph Bell
Joseph Bell, for whom Doyle clerked at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, was famous for deducing a stranger's trade and travels at a glance and later wrote an introduction to an 1892 edition of A Study in Scarlet.
Q 25Which actor is credited with originating 'Elementary, my dear Watson' in an 1899 stage play?
William Gillette
William Gillette wrote and starred in the 1899 play Sherlock Holmes, whose 'Elementary, my dear fellow' is the usual origin given for the catchphrase; it also fixed the curved pipe and dressing gown in the popular image.
Q 26On which date do many Sherlockians celebrate Holmes's birthday?
6 January
Sherlockians mark 6 January, a date fixed by fan tradition rather than the stories; the year 1854 comes from His Last Bow, where Holmes is described as about sixty in 1914.
Q 27Which building society at 221 Baker Street employed a secretary to answer letters to Holmes?
Abbey National
Abbey National's Baker Street headquarters, Abbey House, took in number 221 from 1932, so the society employed a secretary to answer the letters that arrived for Holmes; the museum later took over the post.
Q 28The American backstory of The Valley of Fear is loosely based on which secret society?
The Molly Maguires
The Molly Maguires, a secret society among Irish miners in Pennsylvania's coal country, were broken by a Pinkerton infiltrator in the 1870s, a story Doyle reworked as the Scowrers of Vermissa Valley.
Q 29Doyle was commissioned to write The Sign of the Four at an 1889 dinner also attended by which author?
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was the other guest of Lippincott's editor J. M. Stoddart at the Langham Hotel in August 1889; Stoddart left with promises of both The Sign of the Four and The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Q 30Who played Dr Watson in every one of the 1939–46 Holmes films?
Nigel Bruce
Nigel Bruce played Watson in every one of the 1939–46 Holmes films, and the pair also voiced the roles on radio in The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from 1939.