Sherlock Holmes isn’t real, but when was his birthday? In A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes’s best quip wasn’t “the game’s afoot!” but instead, something a little more intelligent. “What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,” Holmes tells Watson. “The question is what can you make people believe you have done.” Playing the game of perception versus truth is probably just as essential to the canon of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes as the search for obscure clues. But, how did a fictional character convince us he has a real birthday, and why are we still (sometimes) confused about his age?
