The fifty-six short stories and four Sherlock Holmes novels written by Conan Doyle are termed "the Canon" by Holmesians. A popular pastime among fans of Sherlock Holmes is to treat Holmes and Watson as real people, and attempt to elucidate facts about them from clues in the stories or by combining the stories with historical fact. Early scholars of the canon included Ronald Knox in Britain and Christopher Morley in New York. Dorothy L. Sayers, creator of the detective Lord Peter Wimsey, also wrote several essays on Holmesian speculation, later published in Unpopular Opinions. In the foreword to this book, Sayers notes that