A Lemon Tree, My Dear Watson! Trivia Quiz

Answer: 221B Baker Street

Arthur Conan Doyle chose a non-existent number in Baker Street as Holmes' address, but in the 1930s the street numbering changed and 221 became the address of the Abbey Road Building Society. Bags of mail were delivered to them from fans who presumably didn't realise Holmes is fictional.

They employed a secretary to reply to the mail, mostly saying that Holmes has retired and can no longer take cases. In 2002, Abbey National moved from the Baker Street premises, and Sherlock's fan mail is now delivered to the Sherlock Holmes Museum nearby.

Answer: Mrs Hudson

Doctor Watson calls Mrs Hudson "a good cook", but in none of the Sherlock Holmes stories is she ever physically described, nor is her first name ever mentioned. She is exasperated by her lodgers' late hours, strange visitors and sometimes smelly chemical experiments, but puts up with it all with a good grace.

Answer: The Diogenes

Mycroft worked for some secret Government department. The precise nature of his job is never made clear. He sometimes advised Sherlock on a difficult case, but he did not go out and preferred to be an armchair detective.

Answer: Inspector Lestrade

Inspector Lestrade is Arthur Conan Doyle's brain child. WE know little about him, aside from the initial of his first name being G, and the fact that Holmes considered him a decent, but unimaginative, policeman.

Inspector Japp is from Agatha Christie's Poirot stories, Inspector Claude Eustace Teal is to be found in Leslie Charteris' stories about The Saint, and Inspector Morse is Colin Dexter's erudite, opera-loving detective who plies his trade in Oxford.

Answer: A Turkish slipper

Sherlock Holmes is often depicted in illustrations with a deerstalker hat and a calabash pipe, but in the Conan Doyle books he smokes three other kinds of pipe: in "The Man With the Twisted Lip" and "The Sign of Four", Dr Watson describes him smoking "an old briar pipe".

In six other stories it is a clay pipe that Watson sees him smoking, and in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches", Watson reports that Holmes smoked "a long cherrywood pipe".

Answer: The Baker Street Irregulars

In the first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet", we learn that Holmes pays Wiggins, the leader of his "Baker Street Irregulars", a shilling a day. When the lads pull off a particularly clever feat of intelligence-gathering, Holmes rewards them with a bonus of one guinea.

Answer: A venomous snake

In the story, the snake is a Swamp Adder, which is a Conan Doyle invention. Diehard Sherlock Holmes fans (who seem to believe that the snake and their hero are both real!) like to try and puzzle out which species it really was, taking into account the description of the snake, its behaviour and the effect of its venom.

Answer: As an Army medic in Afghanistan

Dr Watson was attached to the Berkshires Regiment, and a bone in his shoulder was shattered by a bullet during the Second Afghan War. He was repatriated to England and took up residence with Holmes, who was looking for someone to share the rent.

Answer: Nothing

The plot hinges on the fact of the dog's behaviour. "The curious incident of the dog in the night-time" is one of the most oft-quoted lines in the Holmes canon. In homage to Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Haddon used the quotation as the title of his 2003 best-selling mystery, featuring an autistic boy as its rather endearing protagonist.

The book was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Whitbread Prize for 2003, among many other awards.

Answer: Beekeeping

In "His Last Bow", published in 1917, Conan Doyle has Holmes retiring to a small farm on the Sussex Downs, where he busies himself with his beehives. The great detective came out of retirement only twice, in the stories "The Second Stain" and "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane".