the archaeologist Harold Wilmerding Bell. One aspect of the Game in its traditional form is the effort to resolve or explain away contradictions in the Holmes canon, such as the location of Watson's war wound, which is described as being in his shoulder in A Study in Scarlet and in his leg in The Sign of Four, or his first name, given as John in A Study in Scarlet and "The Problem of Thor Bridge" but James in "The Man with the Twisted Lip". While Dorothy Sayers and many of the early "Holmesians" used the works of Conan Doyle as the chief basis for their speculations, a more fanciful school of playing the historical-Holmes game is represented by William S. Baring-Gould, author of Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1962), a personal "biography" of Holmes. A more recent "biography" is Nick Rennison's Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography (Atlantic Books, 2005). Since 1998, Leslie S. Klinger has edited The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library (Gasogene Books, Indianapolis), which sums up the available Holmesian "scholarship" alongside the original "canonical" texts. Mark Frost's 1993 novel The List of Seven presents a fictionalized account of Sherlock Holmes' literary origins. In the story, Arthur Conan Doyle, an aspiring but struggling author, is caught up in an assassination attempt and is saved by a man exhibiting many of the prototypical characteristics of Holmes. Frost wrote a follow-up novel called The Six Messiahs. The Holmes family A particularly rich area of "research" is the "uncovering" of details about Holmes' family history and early life, of which almost nothing is said in Conan Doyle's stories. In "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter", Watson states: "I had never heard him refer to his relations, and hardly ever to his early life." But in that story, as well as introducing his brother, Holmes mentions the only facts about his family that are in any of the stories — "My ancestors were country squires... [M]y grandmother... was the sister of Vernet, the French artist" (presumably Horace Vernet). Beyond this, all familial statements are speculation. For example, there is a certain belief that his mother was named Violet, based on Conan Doyle's fondness for the name and the four strong Violets in the canon; however, as Baring-Gould noted, in Holmes' Britain, Violet was a very common name. It is clear from references to "the university" in "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott", "The Adventure