Traditionally, the canon of Sherlock Holmes consists of the 56 short stories and four novels written by the British writer and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In this context, the term "canon" is an attempt to distinguish between Doyle's original works and subsequent works by other authors using the same characters. Usually capitalised by fans of the Sherlockian game as "the Canon", the description of these 60 adventures as the Sherlock Holmes canon and the game of applying the methods of "Higher Criticism" to it was started by Ronald Knox as a playful use of the traditional definition of "canon" as an authoritative list of books accepted as holy scripture.
