Who's Who in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Every Character in the Twelve Stories

Ask most people to name the cast of Sherlock Holmes and you get Holmes, Watson, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, Moriarty and Mycroft. Four of those six are in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the 1892 collection of twelve stories that most readers meet first and that the playable version on this site is built from. The other two appear in it exactly zero times.

• ✅Moriarty: not here. Zero mentions across all twelve stories. He arrives in the next collection.
• ✅Mycroft: also not here.Holmes’s brother has no line, no scene and no mention in this book.
• ✅Mrs. Hudson gets her name twice, both times in the same story, and both times off-stage.
• ✅Lestrade is in two of the twelve. Inspector Bradstreet, whom nobody remembers, is in three.

Everything below was counted in the 1892 text rather than recalled, and the count is the interesting part. If you would rather meet the cast in person, the playable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes opens thirteen doorways into the collection, one per story plus the consulting room itself, with thirty-two named parts to walk into.

🕵️ The short answer: two of the famous six are missing

Search the whole of the 1892 collection for “Moriarty” and you get nothing. Search it for “Mycroft” and you get nothing again. Neither name is spoken, written or alluded to in any of the twelve stories. Mycroft first appears in “The Greek Interpreter”, published in The Strandin September 1893, and Professor Moriarty in “The Final Problem” that December. Both were collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, the book that follows this one. The Baker Street Irregulars are absent too: Wiggins, their leader, belongs to the two novels that came before.

This is worth knowing before you start, because a first-time reader who has met Holmes on screen tends to arrive waiting for the arch-enemy to show up. He never does. What the collection offers instead is twelve separate strangers walking into a sitting room with twelve separate problems, which is a different pleasure and a quieter one.

The playable version lets you pick which door you walk through: the Baker Street consulting room, the avenue outside Briony Lodge, or the Hampshire house where a governess has been told to cut her hair. Role-play The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes →

🏠 The people at 221B

Sherlock Holmes. A consulting detective, the only one in the world by his own account, who takes cases for the interest rather than the fee and refuses several here outright. The collection gives him a chemistry bench, a pipe habit, a scrapbook index of everybody he has ever read about, and a temper when there is nothing to do.

Dr. John Watson. Narrator of eleven of the twelve, an army surgeon lately back from Afghanistan, married and in practice during most of the book and still turning up at Baker Street whenever Holmes sends for him. The case that he is a competent man rather than a comic one has an essay of its own and is not re-argued here.

Mrs. Hudson.The landlady, and much less present than the screen versions suggest. Her name appears exactly twice in the whole book, both times in The Adventure of the Speckled Band, and she does not speak on either occasion. In one she has been woken early by an agitated client and has passed the disturbance up the stairs. In the other Holmes notes approvingly that she has lit the fire before the visitor arrives. Everywhere else in the collection she is “the landlady”, unnamed.

The address itself is nearly as shy. “221B” is printed once in the entire collection, and not in narration: it is in the advertisement Holmes dictates to Watson in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, asking the owner of a lost goose and a black felt hat to call at half past six.

🚔 The police, and which one actually recurs

Inspector Lestrade.Scotland Yard, and the recurring official of the whole Holmes canon, though in this collection he is in two stories rather than the dozen a reader might expect. In The Boscombe Valley Mystery he has been retained by a young woman who believes in the accused man’s innocence, gets stuck, and passes the case to Holmes, and Watson introduces him as the man readers may recollect from A Study in Scarlet. He and Holmes needle each other throughout.

“I am ashamed of you, Holmes,” said Lestrade with dignity after a few minutes.

His second appearance is quieter. In The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor the client’s own letter mentions that Lestrade is already acting in the matter, and that he sees no objection to Holmes joining in and even thinks it might help.

Inspector Bradstreet.The genuinely surprising entry. Bradstreet, of B division, turns up in three of the twelve stories, which is more than Lestrade manages: he takes charge in The Man with the Twisted Lip, he gives evidence at the inquest reported inside The Blue Carbuncle, and he rides down to Berkshire in The Engineer’s Thumb. A tall, stout official in a peaked cap and a frock coat, competent and unruffled, and almost never adapted.

Irene Adler. One appearance, in the opening story, plus two later mentions in passing. She is the only adversary in the book Holmes concedes to, and the essay on why he calls her the woman covers what the text says about her. What television built on top of that single story is a separate and stranger question.

🐍 Two men this book is still remembered for

Spoilers for two stories. The next two entries name the guilty party of The Adventure of the Speckled Band and The Adventure of the Copper Beeches. Nothing else on this page reveals a solution. Skip to the last section if you would rather meet them cold.

Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran, in The Adventure of the Speckled Band. A doctor who practised in India, came home to a ruined family estate and a violent temper, and stands to lose money if either of his stepdaughters marries. He arrives at Baker Street uninvited, immediately after his stepdaughter has left it, and bends the poker into a curve to make his point. Holmes straightens it again after he goes.

“Which of you is Holmes?” asked this apparition. “My name, sir; but you have the advantage of me,” said my companion quietly.

Mr. Rucastle, of the Copper Beeches, in the story that closes the book. A cheerful, enormous, talkative man who hires a governess at three times the going rate on the condition that she cut her hair, wear a dress he supplies and sit where she is told. His first name is given exactly once in the whole story, and not by the narrator: his wife calls him Jephro, in the middle of a warning about somebody watching the house from the road.

Neither man is a criminal mastermind, and neither is an exception here. Two of the twelve turn on a stepfather, one on an employer, one on a family friend who talks a young woman in the household into theft. The rest are thieves and counterfeiters working close to home. The danger in this book is domestic and financial far more often than it is criminal genius.

🗺️ Where Moriarty and Mycroft actually come from

They are real, they are major, and they are in the next book. Mycroft Holmes walks into “The Greek Interpreter” as the older brother with the better mind and none of the ambition, and Professor Moriarty is introduced three months later in “The Final Problem” for the express purpose of finishing Holmes off. Both stories ran in The Strand in 1893 and were collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Both characters have been enormously expanded on screen since, which is why a reader starting at The Adventures can feel that a whole cast is missing.

The absence is worth reading as a design decision rather than an oversight. Doyle wrote these twelve as a monthly magazine serial in which each instalment had to stand alone for a reader who might have missed the last one, so there is no running villain to keep track of and no season arc to fall behind. The arch-enemy arrived only when Doyle wanted the series to end, which it very nearly did.

Everything counted above is checkable: the whole 1892 collection is free at Project Gutenberg, and a search of that file for either famous name returns nothing at all. If you want to know which of the twelve to open first, Doyle published a ranking of his own in 1927.