Sherlock Holmes, the Chronologists, and the Cocaine

A distinctive school of “Sherlockian scholarship” has grown up around the Sherlock Holmes series, one corollary of which is that a consistent chronology of Holmes's life can be assembled by cross‐referencing the datable events in the stories. Holmes's use of cocaine throughout the series provides a test case for analyzing the consequences of the Chronologists' emphasis on the biographical sequences they reconstruct from the texts.