Martin Gardner was not the first person to question the authorship of the Holmes adventures. Almost a decade before Gardner, Sherlockian scholar D. Martin Dakin, in his Sherlock Holmes Commentary (1972), made obvious his suspicions about the authenticity of the last collection of Holmes adventures. In the chapter entitled “The Problem of the Case Book,” Dakin wrote:

This, the last series of Holmesian adventures demands a general consideration […] since serious questions both of authorship and authenticity arise.

Dakin declared two adventures, The Blanched Soldier and The Lion’s Mane (both from 1926), to be “pseudonymous stories” and “pure inventions.” He declared another, The Mazarin Stone (1921), to be “spurious.” He held one story in particular, The Three Gables (1926) in such low regard that he painted it with all three of these insults, declaring, “Never has a feebler story insulted the memory of the great detective.”

Dakin argued that nine of the twelve stories in the final anthology may have been written by someone other than whomever wrote the early stories. He stopped shy of naming names, however, declaring such an undertaking to be “a mystery worthy of Holmes himself.”

To be clear, Dakin wrote his book as a Sherlockian scholar playing a long-accepted game. The game presumes that Holmes and Watson were flesh-and-blood individuals, that Watson wrote the adventures (at least most of them), and that Arthur Conan Doyle was no more than Watson’s literary agent.

Sherlockians are naturally reluctant to accept any challenge to the integrity of the Canon. Walter Pond, for example, responded to Dakin with his essay “A Plea for Respect for the Canon.”

All Sherlockian scholarship must be based on the thesis that […] the stories which the Canon comprises are reports of the great detective’s cases written by Dr. Watson, and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was Dr. Watson’s literary agent. Once this thesis is abandoned, the foundation of Canonical research is undermined and Sherlockians will find themselves adrift on uncharted seas.

For this reason, it is deeply disturbing that some commentators have arrogated to themselves the right to determine […] which of the stories are genuine and which are not […] The conclusion would be inevitable that Sir Arthur […] participated in a fraud when he placed the stories for publication. This, of course, is unthinkable.

In just a few posts from now, we shall identify one such adventure, discussed in detail in Shadow Woman, that Arthur clearly did not write. According to Walter Pond, this will set Sherlockians adrift in uncharted seas.