My Virtual Reading Room

Stephen Fry was faced with 14 questions in the available time on his chosen specialist subject – Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

Here are the 14 questions. How well would you have done?

1. In which publication did the first Holmes story “A Study in Scarlet” first appear in 1887?
2. In “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, by what name did Jack Stapleton head a school in Yorkshire and establish a reputation in entomology?
3. What name did Holmes adopt in his guise as an Irish-American spy?
4. Mycroft Holmes was a founding member of which club of the most unsociable and unclubable men in town?
5. Irene Adler, always known as “the woman” by Holmes, was the prima donna of which opera company when she met the King of Bohemia?
6. In “A Study in Scarlet”, what 5-letter word is scrawled in blood on the wall in a dark corner of the room?
7. In “The Valley of Fear”, what was the local name for the members of Lodge 341 of the Ancient Order of Freemen in the Vermissa Valley?
8. In “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax”, with which London banking firm did Lady Frances have her account?
9. On which theorem did Professor Moriarty write a treatise that won him the mathematical chair at a small English university?
10. When relating his very first case, “Gloria Scott”, whom does Holmes describe as “the only friend I made during the two years that I was at college”?
11. In “The Solitary Cyclist”, what was the nickname of “the greatest brute and bully in South Africa” who conspired with Bob Carruthers to get Violet Smith’s fortune?
12. In “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, how did Dr Roylott get the poisonous snake into the room of his step-daughters, killing Julia?
13. In which story did Holmes make his celebrated reference to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” – the curious incident being that the dog didn’t bark?
14. What did the red-headed London pawnbroker Jabez Wilson have to copy out when he was duped by John Clay into accepting a position with the spurious “Red-Headed League”?

Stephen managed to get eight right.  I will post the answers at a later date.