Sherlock Holmes Trivia
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188 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 188 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 A Study in Scarlet, the word RACHE scrawled in blood on a wall is German for what?
Revenge
Revenge: a Scotland Yard man assumes the killer was interrupted while writing 'Rachel', but Holmes tells him Rache is German for revenge and not to waste time looking for Miss Rachel.
Q 03Holmes's debut novel was first published in which periodical?
Beeton's Christmas Annual
Beeton's Christmas Annual: its publisher bought the novel in 1886 but held it back a year, telling Doyle the market was 'flooded at present with cheap fiction', then led its 1887 shilling annual with it.
Q 04Which Holmes collection gathered the first twelve stories in 1892?
The Adventures
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes gathered the first twelve Strand stories; Doyle wrote 56 in all, though as early as 1891 he told his mother that Holmes 'takes my mind from better things'.
Q 05Dr Watson was wounded while serving as an army surgeon in which conflict?
Second Anglo-Afghan War
Second Anglo-Afghan War: Watson was shipped home with his health 'irretrievably ruined' and nine months' leave on eleven shillings and sixpence a day, which is why he needed someone to share rooms.
Q 06What wounded Watson at the Battle of Maiwand?
A jezail bullet
A jezail bullet, fired from a long-barrelled musket, struck Watson at Maiwand; his orderly Murray saved him from capture by throwing him across a packhorse and leading him back to the British lines.
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 was started, Holmes says, for men too shy or misanthropic for company who still like comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals; three offences of talking can get a member expelled.
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
Switzerland: Doyle saw the falls on a short holiday there with his wife and thought the 'terrible place' would make 'a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock', even if it buried his bank account too.
Q 11Holmes says he slipped Moriarty's grip at the falls thanks to which 'Japanese system of wrestling'?
Baritsu
Baritsu is apparently Doyle's misspelling of bartitsu, a real self-defence method that Edward Barton-Wright brought to London in 1898 after three years in Japan, mixing jujitsu with boxing and cane-fighting.
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 21Which 1903 story has Holmes reappear and reveal he faked his death?
The Adventure of the Empty House
'The Adventure of the Empty House' has an old book collector call on Watson and throw off his disguise; Watson, seeing his dead friend, faints 'for the first and the last time in my life'.
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 14Holmes's index records that the opera singer Irene Adler was born in which American state?
New Jersey
New Jersey, in 1858, the index says; the American contralto goes on to beat Holmes at his own game, trailing him home in men's clothes and wishing him good night before she slips out of the country.
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
£25 was all Ward, Lock & Co. offered for the copyright, and they refused Doyle a royalty; he took it for the sake of getting into print and 'never at any time received another penny' for the book.
Q 20Which story did Doyle himself name as his favourite Holmes tale?
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
'The Adventure of the Speckled Band' topped the list of twelve Doyle drew up for The Strand in 1927; he was sure it would be on every reader's list.
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 made Doyle his outpatient clerk and would tell a stranger's trade and travels at a glance; in 1892 Doyle wrote to him, 'It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes.'
Q 25Which actor is credited with originating 'Elementary, my dear Watson' in an 1899 stage play?
William Gillette
William Gillette is usually credited with 'Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow', though not every version of his script has it; when he cabled Doyle 'May I marry Holmes?', the reply was that he could marry or murder him.
Q 26Which Shakespeare play did Christopher Morley cite to date Holmes's January birthday?
Twelfth Night
Twelfth Night, also a name for 6 January, is the one Shakespeare play Holmes quotes twice, Christopher Morley argued in backing that date for a birthday the stories never give.
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 dined with Doyle, the Irish MP T. P. Gill and 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 as a lovable bumbler, dimmer and more comic than the capable army doctor who narrates Doyle's stories, which earned his version the nickname 'Boobus Britannicus'.