As a Holmesian bridge player, I cannot help being struck by the fact that writers of bridge books often like to use the characters of Holmes and Watson to illustrate the use of deduction in bridge. Thus, Albert Dormer opens his book on deduction in bridge with a scene from 221B Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes explains the finer points of bridge to the amazed Dr Watson.¹ And Frank Thomas has written an entire book about Sherlock Holmes’s alleged exploits at the bridge table.² As a Holmesian scholar, I cannot help wondering whether there is any element of truth in these non-canonical sources, or whether they are simply to be discarded as nothing but lies, damn lies and pastiche! In other words, is there any evidence to suggest that Sherlock Holmes was ever a bridge player, let alone a master of the game?

Let us first note that there seem to be an unbridgeable chronological gap between Sherlock Holmes’s active career as portrayed in the Canon and the modern game of contract bridge. The invention of the latter can be dated exactly to the 31st October 1925, when Harold S. Vanderbilt, aboard his yacht Finland on a cruise from Los Angeles to New York, introduced his guests to the new and modified rules that were later to be universally accepted as defining the game, an event which postdates the last Canonical case by more than a decade according to all available chronologies.

One way to bridge this gap would be to claim that Holmes took up bridge after 1925, that is, long after his retirement as a detective. However, this route is not very appealing to the serious scholar, since there can be no canonical evidence to support such a claim. But there is also a second possibility, since the modern version of bridge is only the last successor in a long line of different games, descending (probably) from the game of whist. The history of these games, several of which were known by the name of bridge, go well back into the 19th century. The exact origin of the term ‘bridge’, as well as the game itself, is obscure, but it is first attested in a small booklet published in London in 1886 entitled ‘Biritch or Russian Whist’. Apparently, ‘biritch’ (which is not a Russian word) was later modified to ‘bridge’. It is therefore possible that Holmes and Watson may have come into contact with one of these early versions of the game, and perhaps even been active players. Let us now see if there is any evidence to support this possibility.

The word ‘bridge’ occurs many times in the Canon, but unfortuntely not one of these occurrences refers to the the card game. We may note here that Goodrich’s Good Old Index contains the entry ‘Bridge (card game)’ with a reference to [THOR 1057],³ but this is clearly a mistake since the only ‘bridge’ talked about on this page is Thor Bridge. Not surprisingly, most of the Canonical occurrences of ‘bridge’ concern bridges of this kind, the most frequently mentioned one being London Bridge [TWIS, GREE, NORW, BRUC, RETI], followed by Waterloo Bridge [STUD, FIVE, TWIS], Hammersmith Bridge [SIXN], Vauxhall Bridge [SIGN], Westminster Bridge [LADY], and the aforementioned Thor Bridge [THOR].

Unnamed bridges are mentioned in [TWIS, BRUC, HOUN], and the drawbridge at Birlstone is often referred to as ‘the bridge’ in [VALL]. The dummy bell-rope is described as ‘a bridge’ in [SPEC]; Peterson’s hat settled on ‘the bridge’ of Holmes’s nose in [BLUE]; and ‘bridge’ is used as a verb in [HOUN]. But nowhere is a reference to the game of bridge to be found.

If we turn to the ancestor game of whist instead, we are a little more successful. The first explicit mention of whist is in connection with the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair, who had played a rubber of whist with Mr. Murray, Sir John Hardy, and Colonel Moran after dinner on the day of his death. [EMPT 484] This card game plays a crucial part in the story, since it provides the motive for Adair’s murder, but it gives us no evidence concerning Holmes’s card playing skills.

The second time we come across the game of whist in the Canon it again acts as a precursor to death, when Brenda Tregennis plays whist with her brothers on the night of her murder [DEVI 957]. This time the card game is more coincidental, but again we learn nothing about Holmes’s relation to the game.

The most interesting passage in the Canon, from the point of view of this article, occurs in [REDH 186—188], where we first hear Mr. Merryweather complaining about missing his rubber, and later find Holmes saying that he had brought a pack of cards so that Mr. Merrywather might have his rubber after all. Now, which card game are they talking about here? A rubber is a set of three games, in which each of four players in turn team up with each of the other players. And rubbers occur in games of the whist family, bridge as well as whist. Since the case in question occurred after the publication of the ‘biritch’ booklet in 1886 (most major chronologists date it to 1890), it is at least possible that the game Holmes had in mind was a new variation on the old game of whist known as ‘bridge’. In any case, the episode shows that Holmes was well acquainted with card games of the whist family.

Let us now sum up the results. On the negative side, we have established, by means of a purely chronological argument, that Holmes and Watson never played the modern version of contract bridge during the Baker Street years, and that accounts of such bridge games (as found in many bridge books) are to be dismissed as mere pastiche. On the positive side, we have found evidence in [REDH] to support the claim that Holmes was at least a whist player, and we have found nothing to eliminate the possibility that he was also acquainted with one of the early forms of bridge. But this is probably as far as we may go in bridging the gap between the master of deduction and the game of bridge.