Sherlock Holmes Research Wiki

Wiki Index

5 min read

This page was created as an experiment to convert a bunch of raw information (notably, the plain text versions of the Sherlock Holmes canon, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and have an AI agent index it all and convert it into a Wiki which could be augemented with additional sources and queries.

The idea came from watching this video on Onchain AI Garage’s Youtube Channel, about “Kaparthy’s LLM Wiki” which had an interesting workflow: basically you dump a bunch of data files into a directory, have the LLM ingest it and automatically generate a wiki, and that wiki is maintained entirely by the AI. You can add additional sources and queries to augment the wiki, but never end up writing any part of the wiki yourself.

It’s a cool idea. I’m a bit of a Sherlock Holmes fan, so I thought it would be interesting to use the fifty-six short stories and four novels as test. I didn’t do much research, I just cloned the agent skills here for use with claude code, and set it to work. Within an hour, I had the following website.

Overview

Sources

Primary texts in raw/ — one summary page per ingested file.

  • A Study in Scarlet — First novel (1887); Holmes and Watson meet; Jefferson Hope; dual-narrative with Utah/Mormon backstory (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • The Sign of the Four — Second novel (1890); Agra treasure; Jonathan Small; Watson meets Mary Morstan; cocaine subplot (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — First short-story collection (1892); 12 stories incl. SCAN, SPEC, REDH; first appearance of Irene Adler (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes — Second collection (1893); 12 stories; SILV, GREE (Mycroft), FINA (Reichenbach Falls / Holmes’s death) (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles — Third novel (1902); Dartmoor Gothic; Stapleton; Holmes’s secret vigil on the moor (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • The Return of Sherlock Holmes — Third collection (1905); 13 stories; EMPT (Holmes returns, Colonel Moran); DANC cipher; CHAS ethics (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • The Valley of Fear — Fourth novel (1915); dual narrative; Moriarty at his most explicit; Birdy Edwards / the Scowrers (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • His Last Bow — Fourth collection (1917); 7 stories; BRUC (Mycroft in full); DEVI; LAST (WWI, Holmes as spy) (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes — Final collection (1927); 12 stories; darker tone; Holmes narrates 2 stories himself (1 source, 2026-04-06)

Entities

Named characters, organisations, and objects.

  • Sherlock Holmes — The world’s only consulting detective; protagonist of all 60 Canon stories (5 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • John H. Watson — Army doctor, Holmes’s companion, narrator of ~54 of 60 stories (5 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • Professor James Moriarty — “The Napoleon of Crime”; Holmes’s supreme adversary; appears directly only in FINA; discussed at length in Valley of Fear (3 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • Mycroft Holmes — Sherlock’s older brother; more gifted analytically but entirely sedentary; the Diogenes Club; GREE and BRUC (2 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • Mrs. Hudson — Landlady of 221B Baker Street; Holmes’s long-suffering domestic anchor (5 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • Inspector Lestrade — Scotland Yard’s most prominent detective; competent foil; recurring across the Canon (4 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • Irene Adler — “The Woman”; the only person to have outwitted Holmes; one canonical appearance (SCAN) (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • Mary Morstan — Watson’s wife; client in The Sign of the Four; her fortune lost, enabling Watson’s proposal (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • Sir Henry Baskerville — Client and target in Hound of the Baskervilles; Canadian heir to the estate (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • Roger Baskerville) — Principal villain of Hound; naturalist cover; phosphorescent hound; true Baskerville heir (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • Jonathan Small — Antagonist of Sign of Four; one-legged ex-soldier; Agra treasure; colonial betrayal backstory (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • The Baker Street Irregulars — Holmes’s street-urchin intelligence network; led by Wiggins (2 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • Colonel Sebastian Moran — Moriarty’s chief of staff; air-gun assassin; antagonist of EMPT (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • Charles Augustus Milverton — “The worst man in London”; the Canon’s definitive blackmailer; shot dead in CHAS (1 source, 2026-04-06)
  • Sidney Paget — Original Strand Magazine illustrator; ~356 drawings across Adventures, Memoirs, Hound, Return; invented the deerstalker (5 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • Henry Baker — Innocent catalyst of BLUE; his lost goose contained the Blue Carbuncle; subject of Holmes’s hat-deduction set-piece (1 source, 2026-04-07)
  • The Giant Rat of Sumatra — Holmes’s most famous untold case; ship Matilda Briggs; “a story for which the world is not yet prepared” (VAMP, 1 source, 2026-04-07)

Concepts

Recurring themes, methods, settings, and analytical lenses.

  • The Deductive Method — Holmes’s investigative technique; observation, classification, abductive reasoning; the engine of every plot (5 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • The Canon — The 60 Holmes stories by Doyle (1887–1927); structure, ingestion status, BSJA codes, Doyle’s relationship with Holmes (5 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • Victorian London — The Canon’s primary setting; fog, class, empire, criminal geography, the Thames (5 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • 221B Baker Street — Holmes and Watson’s lodgings; the Canon’s domestic anchor; the ritual of the arriving client (5 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • Publication History — All 60 stories in chronological magazine order with dates; compendium book publication dates; key milestones (9 sources, 2026-04-06)
  • Untold Cases — ~30 cases referenced by name in the Canon but never narrated; catalogue, literary function, notable examples (6 sources, 2026-04-07)
  • Holmes’s Cocaine Use — Cocaine and morphine use across the Canon; Watson’s campaign to end it; story-by-story arc from STUD to DYIN (6 sources, 2026-04-07)
  • Narrative Voice — The 6 stories not narrated by Watson; Holmes-narrated, third-person, and framed accounts; summary table (3 sources, 2026-04-07)

Queries

Filed research questions and answers — empty until first query is run.

Total pages: 37 (1 overview, 9 sources, 17 entities, 8 concepts, 2 meta)

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