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Sherlock Holmes never said that line

"Elementary, my dear Watson," the line everyone gives Sherlock Holmes, does not appear in Conan Doyle's stories.

On the billboard

Whenever an ad or a parody plays detective, out come the deerstalker, the pipe and that one sentence. Yet the sentence never appears as such in any Holmes story Doyle wrote; it settled into place through later works by other hands. Meanwhile, on Baker Street in London, a Sherlock Holmes Museum displays the fictional address 221B.

In the book The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes · Arthur Conan Doyle

What Holmes actually says again and again in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is my dear Watson. In "The Blue Carbuncle" he studies a battered hat that has lost its owner and reads off, one point after another, what kind of man owns it. In the same story the address turns up in the newspaper notice Holmes drafts: 221B, Baker Street.

Say it to a friend like this

"Elementary, my dear Watson" is not in the original stories. The real Holmes reads a man from one old hat.