🗺️ The Lore Codex
The world of the canon broken down like a game codex: the supporting figures, places, organizations, artifacts, and turning-point events — each cross-linked to the stories where it appears and the characters it touches. The principal cast — Holmes, Watson, Moriarty, and company — have full profiles in the Characters section.
🎭 Figures
The supporting cast — clients, villains, Yarders, and allies. The principal characters have full profiles in the Characters section.
🧢 Wiggins
The dirty-faced lieutenant of the Baker Street Irregulars, marshalling his dozen urchins up the seventeen steps to report. Holmes pays him a shilling a day per boy and trusts his eyes over half of Scotland Yard's.
Full entry →💍 Mary Morstan
The governess who brings Holmes six pearls and a ten-year mystery — and walks out engaged to Watson. Calm under revelations that would flatten most clients, she is the canon's model of quiet courage.
Full entry →🕵️ Tobias Gregson
Lestrade's great rival at the Yard — "the smartest of the Scotland Yarders," in Holmes's faint praise, and as jealous of Lestrade as a pair of professional beauties. Energetic, brave, and reliably one deduction short.
Full entry →📓 Stanley Hopkins
The young inspector who studies Holmes's methods like a disciple and calls him in when a case outruns the textbook. Holmes scolds him, coaches him, and quietly rates him the future of the Yard.
Full entry →🛎️ Billy the Page
The sharp little page-boy of 221B, announcing clients, fielding threats, and guarding the bullet-scarred sitting room with perfect Cockney aplomb. The household's third member, after Holmes and Mrs Hudson.
Full entry →🤝 Young Stamford
Watson's old dresser from Barts, met by chance at the Criterion bar — the man who uttered the most consequential introduction in fiction and then vanished from it entirely.
Full entry →🐎 Jefferson Hope
The American cabman who hunted two men across two continents for twenty years, offering each a choice of pills as judgement. Captured at 221B, he dies smiling, his work complete — the canon's first tragic avenger.
Full entry →🦵 Jonathan Small
The wooden-legged convict of the Agra treasure, bound by an oath to three Sikh troopers and undone by a poison dart he never fired. His confession is the canon's longest — and its best case for how treasure ruins men.
Full entry →🐍 Dr Grimesby Roylott
The huge, hot-tempered stepfather of Stoke Moran, who bends a fireplace poker to intimidate Holmes and dies by the swamp adder he trained. The canon's definitive domestic tyrant — violence behind respectable walls.
Full entry →♠️ John Clay
Murderer, thief, smasher, and forger with a royal duke's blood and an Eton polish — "the fourth smartest man in London," by Holmes's count. He digs for French gold under a pawnshop and insists the police call him "sir".
Full entry →🗂️ Charles Augustus Milverton
The king of blackmailers, smiling behind gold-rimmed glasses while he ruins wives and daughters by instalments. The one villain who makes Holmes turn burglar — and whose death Holmes declines to investigate.
Full entry →🚲 Violet Hunter
The governess who consults Holmes about a job that pays too well and requires her to cut her hair. Observant, steady, and brave enough to explore a locked wing on instruction — the canon's best client-turned-operative.
Full entry →🦅 Von Bork
The Kaiser's master spy, four years embedded in England with a safe full of naval signals — every prize of which was fed to him by an Irish-American agent named Altamont. The last opponent, beaten before the war begins.
Full entry →📍 Places
The map of the canon — where the cases live.
🚪 221B Baker Street
The first-floor rooms above Mrs Hudson's: seventeen steps up, a sitting room of chemical stains and bullet-pocked patriotism, and the two armchairs from which every case begins. The most famous address in fiction — and a real museum today.
Full entry →🚨 Scotland Yard
The Metropolitan Police headquarters and the professional foil to Baker Street. Its inspectors — Lestrade, Gregson, Hopkins, Bradstreet — supply warrants, manpower, and the official credit Holmes rarely wants.
Full entry →🤫 The Diogenes Club
The queerest club in London: no member may take notice of any other, and speech is grounds for expulsion. Co-founded by Mycroft Holmes as a refuge for the unclubbable; its Stranger's Room is the only place conversation is legal.
Full entry →🌫️ Dartmoor
Fog, granite tors, the Grimpen Mire that swallows ponies whole, and a prison at Princetown leaking convicts onto the moor. The canon's great gothic landscape — where a legend of a hound was engineered into a murder weapon.
Full entry →🌊 The Reichenbach Falls
A fearful place in the Swiss Alps: a torrent plunging into a coal-black abyss above Meiringen. The narrow dead-end path along its ledge hosted the most famous struggle in detective fiction — and, for three years of readers, its grave.
Full entry →🏰 Baskerville Hall
The ancestral seat on Dartmoor, complete with yew alley, portrait gallery, and a family curse dated 1742. Its portraits matter: one Regency face, stripped of its curls by Holmes's hand, exposes the villain's bloodline.
Full entry →⚗️ St Bartholomew's Hospital
The London teaching hospital where, in a chemical laboratory on New Year's Day of the saga, young Stamford introduced a wounded army doctor to a stranger beating corpses to study bruising. "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."
Full entry →🐝 The Sussex Downs
Holmes's retirement: a small farm with a view of the Channel, five miles from Eastbourne, given over to bees and the occasional jellyfish murder. He wrote his Practical Handbook of Bee Culture here — the magnum opus of his later years.
Full entry →🏛️ Organizations
The institutions, gangs, and societies moving beneath the surface.
🧢 The Baker Street Irregulars
A dozen street urchins under Wiggins, paid a shilling a day plus expenses. They can go everywhere, see everything, and overhear everyone — Holmes's all-terrain intelligence service, and the canon's proof he trusts talent over class.
Full entry →🕸️ The Moriarty Organization
A criminal exchange, not a gang: the Professor plans and insulates, funds flow through respectable hands, and any agent who falls is defended at any cost — but never connected upward. Broken by Holmes in a single coordinated sweep, save two men.
Full entry →🍊 The Ku Klux Klan
The real terror society, reaching across the Atlantic in the canon: five orange pips posted as a death warrant, and ships' sailing dates as its timetable. The canon's starkest reminder that some evils are bigger than one detective.
Full entry →⭕ The Red Circle
A Neapolitan brotherhood of extortion and murder whose reach follows emigrants to New York and London. Join once, leave never — the canon's template for the vendetta that crosses oceans.
Full entry →⛏️ The Scowrers
Lodge 341 of an ancient order rotted into a protection racket ruling the Vermissa coal valley by beating and murder — until the Pinkerton agent Birdy Edwards spent years inside it and brought the whole lodge to the gallows.
Full entry →💎 Artifacts
The objects cases turn on — gems, weapons, and the furniture of 221B.
🥿 The Persian Slipper
Nailed to the mantelpiece at 221B with tobacco in its toe — the canon's emblem of Holmes's domestic anarchy, alongside correspondence pinned by jack-knife and cigars in the coal scuttle.
Full entry →💠 The Blue Carbuncle
A forty-grain crystallised-charcoal wonder with a history of two murders and a suicide, lately of the Countess of Morcar's hotel suite — and latterly of a Christmas goose's crop. Every facet, Holmes notes, is a deed of blood.
Full entry →💛 The Mazarin Stone
The great yellow Crown diamond, stolen and recovered in a single evening of stagecraft: a wax bust, a gramophone violin, and the thief's own pocket as the handover point.
Full entry →🔫 Von Herder's Air-Gun
A silent, powerful air-rifle firing soft revolver bullets, built by a blind German mechanic to Moriarty's order for one marksman's use. It killed Ronald Adair through a closed window and dented a wax Holmes an inch from history.
Full entry →💃 The Dancing Men Cipher
A Chicago gang's private substitution alphabet of capering stick figures, flags marking word-ends. Broken by Holmes with letter frequency — and turned against its owner in a single forged line. Playable on this site.
Full entry →🪙 The Sign of Four Treasure
The Agra treasure: a rajah's iron box of gems that ruined every hand it passed through, finally scattered along six miles of Thames mud. Its loss is the canon's happiest ending — it frees Mary Morstan to marry a doctor of modest means.
Full entry →📚 The Commonplace Books
Holmes's hand-indexed encyclopaedia of everything: biographies of vampires filed beside Victor Lynch the forger, "Vanderbilt and the Yeggman", voyages of the Gloria Scott. His external memory — the ancestor of every tool on this site.
Full entry →⏳ Events
The turning points of the saga, in order.
🤝 The Meeting (1881)
Stamford introduces two men who each need someone to split rent with: a wounded army doctor and a stranger who identifies him at a glance. They inspect rooms at 221B the next day. Nothing in fiction is the same afterwards.
Full entry →🌹 The Scandal (1888)
The King of Bohemia hires Holmes to retrieve a photograph; Irene Adler out-thinks, out-disguises, and out-classes him. From that day he keeps her portrait and never again trusts an easy assumption about women — or about winning.
Full entry →🌊 The Fall (4 May 1891)
Holmes and Moriarty go over the Reichenbach ledge locked together — so the world believes. A farewell note under a cigarette case, an unfinished walking stick against a rock, and ten years of public mourning for a fictional man.
Full entry →🌍 The Great Hiatus (1891–1894)
Three missing years: Tibet as the Norwegian explorer Sigerson, Persia, Mecca, Khartoum, and a laboratory in Montpellier — while London believed him dead and Colonel Moran kept watch. The most argued-over gap in any fictional biography.
Full entry →🚪 The Return (1894)
An elderly bookseller in Watson's study straightens up into a dead man; Watson faints for the only time in his life. That night the wax bust, the empty house, and Moran's air-gun close both the hiatus and the Moriarty organization's last account.
Full entry →🐝 The Retirement (c. 1903)
Holmes leaves London for bees on the Sussex Downs, refusing dazzling fees to come back. The cases thereafter are his own tellings, a jellyfish murder, and one last favour to the nation.
Full entry →🍃 His Last Bow (2 August 1914)
On the eve of the war, an Irish-American agent delivers a final package to a German spymaster and reveals himself as Holmes, two years undercover. "There's an east wind coming, Watson." The canon's farewell, in the saga's own chronology.
Full entry →