By Arthur Conan Doyle
Classic cases of the great detective
Subject
Themes
From rooms at 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes, the world's only consulting detective, receives a procession of the desperate, the frightened and the baffled, and beside him, recording everything, sits his friend and fellow lodger Dr John Watson, an army surgeon invalided home from Afghanistan. Twenty-three adventures unfold between them, and through every one runs a single conviction: that truth hides in small things, and that a trained observer can read a life from a hat brim, a trouser knee, a typewritten letter or a dog that does not bark in the night.
From rooms at 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes, the world's only consulting detective, receives a procession of the desperate, the frightened and the baffled, and beside him, recording everything, sits his friend and fellow lodger Dr John Watson, an army surgeon invalided home from Afghanistan.…
The adventures first appeared as monthly stories in the Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1893, and were gathered into two volumes in 1892 and 1894. Sherlock Holmes himself had been introduced earlier, in the novels A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890), but it was the short story…
Again and again the cases end not with handcuffs but with a private judgement delivered in a Baker Street armchair. The official machinery of warrants, assizes and gallows operates throughout the adventures, yet the most striking verdicts are the ones Holmes reserves to himself, acting, as he puts…
The cases are built on a single proposition, stated and demonstrated until it acquires the force of law: the world is legible to anyone who has trained themselves to read it. The distinction is never between seeing and not seeing but between seeing and observing. Watson has looked at the seventeen…
The criminals of these adventures are rarely strangers climbing through windows. Overwhelmingly they are insiders: stepfathers, sons, butlers, trainers, employers and trusted gentlemen, and the crimes are committed behind the lace curtains of villas, vicarages and country houses. The geography of…
Beneath every mystery runs a quieter constant: the partnership of two men who share rooms, dangers and a singular division of labour. Holmes supplies the brilliance; Watson supplies the humanity, the record, and the audience without which brilliance would echo in an empty room. The arrangement is…
Time and again the engine of the mystery is not a fresh crime but an old one returning to collect its debt. The pattern is so persistent that it amounts to a moral law of this fictional world: a guilty past can be renamed, exported, invested and forgotten by everyone except itself, and sooner or…
Sherlock Holmes is the world's first and only consulting detective, the final court of appeal for clients ranging from frightened governesses and unemployed clerks to bankers, lords and the crowned heads of Europe. His method rests on the conviction that the little things are infinitely the most…
Dr John Watson is the narrator and witness of nearly every adventure, an army surgeon invalided home from Afghanistan with a Jezail bullet whose ache still announces changes in the weather. Through his eyes the science of deduction becomes a story; without him there would be brilliance but no…
Professor James Moriarty appears in person only at the very end, yet he casts a shadow long enough to close the entire saga. He is introduced as a paradox: a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed with a phenomenal mathematical faculty, who at twenty-one wrote a treatise on the binomial…
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. Irene Adler appears in a single adventure, yet she occupies a place in his memory that no other figure, male or female, ever matches: she is the one opponent who beat him fairly, completely and with style. Born in New Jersey, she made her name as an…
Mycroft Holmes enters the saga as a surprise, for Watson had come to regard his friend as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, with no relations and hardly a past. A casual conversation about hereditary aptitudes draws out the truth: Sherlock's gifts run in the blood, and his elder…
Inspector G. Lestrade of Scotland Yard is the official face of the law in these adventures, and the standing measure against which the unofficial consulting detective shines. Small, wiry and ferret-like, he is a fixture of the police force, energetic, tenacious and brave, and at the same time wedded…
A masked visitor calls at Baker Street and proves to be the King of Bohemia, soon to marry a Scandinavian princess. His former lover, the American opera singer Irene Adler, holds a compromising photograph of the two together and has resisted every attempt at burglary and theft to recover it.…
On a night of screaming equinoctial gales, young John Openshaw brings Baker Street a tale of inherited terror. His uncle Elias, once a Confederate colonel, fled Florida to live as a foul-tempered recluse in Sussex. An envelope from Pondicherry containing five dried orange pips and the letters K.K.K.…
A railway guard delivers a gruesome new patient to Watson's practice: Victor Hatherley, a young hydraulic engineer whose thumb has been hacked from his hand. Over breakfast at Baker Street he relates his night's adventure. Starved of clients, he accepted fifty guineas from the cadaverous Colonel…
Silver Blaze, favourite for the Wessex Cup, has vanished from the King's Pyland stables on Dartmoor, and his trainer John Straker lies dead with a shattered skull. The stable boy was drugged with opium in his curried mutton, and a stranger who offered money for racing tips has been arrested with the…
Pressed to tidy the cluttered Baker Street rooms, Holmes instead opens a tin box of early records and tells of the case that gave him his first stride towards a profession. Reginald Musgrave of Hurlstone, one of the oldest inhabited houses in Sussex, caught his brilliant butler Brunton at two in the…
A conversation about hereditary gifts brings Watson a revelation: Holmes has a brother. Mycroft, seven years his senior, is his superior in observation and deduction but entirely without ambition or energy, an auditor of government books who reasons from his armchair and never stirs from his orbit…
Sherlock Holmes is the world's first and only consulting detective, the final court of appeal for clients ranging from frightened governesses and unemployed clerks to bankers, lords and the crowned heads of Europe. His method rests on the conviction that the little things are infinitely the most…
Dr John Watson is the narrator and witness of nearly every adventure, an army surgeon invalided home from Afghanistan with a Jezail bullet whose ache still announces changes in the weather. Through his eyes the science of deduction becomes a story; without him there would be brilliance but no…
Professor James Moriarty appears in person only at the very end, yet he casts a shadow long enough to close the entire saga. He is introduced as a paradox: a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed with a phenomenal mathematical faculty, who at twenty-one wrote a treatise on the binomial…
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. Irene Adler appears in a single adventure, yet she occupies a place in his memory that no other figure, male or female, ever matches: she is the one opponent who beat him fairly, completely and with style. Born in New Jersey, she made her name as an…
Mycroft Holmes enters the saga as a surprise, for Watson had come to regard his friend as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, with no relations and hardly a past. A casual conversation about hereditary aptitudes draws out the truth: Sherlock's gifts run in the blood, and his elder…
Inspector G. Lestrade of Scotland Yard is the official face of the law in these adventures, and the standing measure against which the unofficial consulting detective shines. Small, wiry and ferret-like, he is a fixture of the police force, energetic, tenacious and brave, and at the same time wedded…
By Arthur Conan Doyle
Subject
Themes
From rooms at 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes, the world's only consulting detective, receives a procession of the desperate, the frightened and the baffled, and beside him, recording everything, sits his friend and fellow lodger Dr John Watson, an army surgeon invalided home from Afghanistan. Twenty-three adventures unfold between them, and through every one runs a single conviction: that truth hides in small things, and that a trained observer can read a life from a hat brim, a trouser knee, a typewritten letter or a dog that does not bark in the night.