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    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Other Stories
    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Other Stories
    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Other Stories
    Ebook2,036 pages32 hours

    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Other Stories

    By Arthur Conan Doyle and Michael A. Cramer

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    About this ebook

    No home library is complete without the classics! The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Other Stories brings together the essential works from Arthur Conan Doyle in an elegant, leather-bound, omnibus edition—a keepsake to be read and treasured.

    There is one literary detective who stands above all others, whose powers of deduction are known the world over, whose influence can still be felt in today's most modern whodunits. Who is it, you ask? Why, it's elementary! Sherlock Holmes, the famous gumshoe of 221B Baker Street. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--the man who made him famous in such tales as The Hound of the Baskervilles and A Study in Scarlet--changed the world of mysteries, inspiring legions of devoted fans.

     

    Whether you're a devotee or you've yet to be awed by Holmes's powers of deduction, you'll love this Canterbury Classics edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous works, including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four, The Valley of Fear, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. 

     

    A classic keepsake for fans of detective novels, as well as all great literature, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Other Stories is the perfect addition to any library.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCanterbury Classics
    Release dateNov 15, 2012
    ISBN9781607108702
    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Other Stories
    Author

    Arthur Conan Doyle

    Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a Scottish writer and physician, most famous for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes and long-suffering sidekick Dr Watson. Conan Doyle was a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels.

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    • 4/5
      A very enjoyable collection of Holmes and Watson mysteries, although there is a decided return to the romantic/melodramatic stylings of the early novels.

      After the opening story, which goes to lunatic levels to bring Holmes back (but fair enough), there are some great stories throughout. Watson's narrative voice is pitch-perfect, as is his relationship with Holmes. Beyond this, the various Scotland Yard characters are given more depth, and are able to work WITH Holmes, as opposed to just following him around and always being wrong.

      As I said above, though, many of the stories seem to veer toward that very 19th century melodrama feel in their denouements, although Conan Doyle handles it quite emotionlessly, so at least it isn't protracted. And many of the stories - those featuring missing people or objects - often seem to end with the same kind of conclusion (I won't say which, but you'll notice the pattern). Still, these weren't initially published in book form, and so I don't hold vague similarities against them.

      An enjoyable collection of stories. I'm two-thirds of the way through the canon already!
    • 4/5
      While all of the stories are good, the last two in the book are the best in my opinion. They feel very classically Holmes.
    • 5/5
      Another fabulous novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Same characters, great new mysteries. My only problem with this book had to do with the formatting as opposed to the writing. In places, where there should have been pictures, my kindle only showed the word "graphic". It would have been nice to see the map/sketch instead of a note that there should be a picture. Other than that, brilliant!
    • 4/5
      The Return of Sherlock Holmes derives its title from the fact that the famous detective was presumed dead after the fight with his nemesis Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. And Holmes has returned alright. This volume provides the reader with thirteen short stories centered around Holmes and his partner Watson. In the first of those thirteen stories, the duo hunt down a would-be assassin of Holmes so that the detective can finally return to his lodgings at 221b Baker Street. In the last story of the collection, Watson mentions that Sherlock Holmes himself was not interested in the continuation of the publication of his adventures anymore. There is also talk of Holmes planning to write down some of his stories himself to while away the time of his retirement.What I found most interesting about this volume of short stories is the fact that while the structure of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories is basically the same every time, it is quite astonishing how he always manages to engage the reader anew in every story. One would think that the author has to run out of material for his cases at some point so that the stories will become repetitive to a certain extent. But they just do not. To my mind, this is quite a remarkable achievement considering the sheer endless number of Sherlock Holmes stories. From a structuralist perspective each story can be described as beginning with Holmes and Watson idling at their place in Baker Street, followed by the presentation of a new case and eventually investigations of the matter and its, in Holmes' eyes pretty obvious, solution. This, however, does not lessen the literary quality of the stories. In the reading process you actually do not think about the structure as your attention is almost always immediately caught by the case at hand.The looming retirement of Sherlock Holmes is something that might have troubled readers at the time of publication of The Return of Sherlock Holmes. But as we know today, there are quite some stories to follow and Holmes will not retire for quite some time. Personally, I am happy about this since reading the stories is always enjoyable. I do already dread the point when I will have read every Sherlock Holmes story that has ever been written. But then again, there is always the option of re-reads.I know that this review does not focus too much on the content of the single stories, but as I see it this is not really necessary. I would think that readers of Sherlock Holmes would usually start with the more famous works, the novels, that is, and not with this collection of short stories. So, whoever reads this collection is probably already well acquainted with the literary figure of Sherlock Holmes. Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning that the stories in this volume do not lack in quality and are a pleasure to read.On the whole, four stars for The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
    • 4/5
      Delightful stuff, loved the librivox.org free audiobook version. Not quite as engaging as the earlier stories, but still well worth the read.
    • 4/5
      A collection of short stories.
    • 4/5
      Holmes has returned from Reichenbach Falls, much to the surprise of - well, everyone, considering he was thought to be dead. There are thirteen stories in this collection, short enough to be fast-paced and well-worded enough to be deeply engaging. Some of my favorite stories were the Norwood Builder (with some horror undertones; faked deaths and grotesque murders ahoy!), Charles Agustus Milverton, The Solitary Cyclist and the Second Stain. There were a few dull moments - the Adventure of the Three Students is pretty terrible, in my opinion, with a 'mystery' that is both boring and instantly solveable. But overall it is a solid collection in the Holmes canon.
    • 4/5
      This is the third collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories, consisting of a baker's dozen of puzzle pieces with the Great Detective. I wouldn't recommend them as an introduction to Holmes. In the last story of the second collection, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, "The Final Problem," Doyle famously sent Holmes over Reichenbach Falls. The introduction in the edition I read relates how a boatman told Doyle that even if Holmes survived the fall over the cliff, "he was never quite the same man afterwards." I don't know if I'd go that far, but it's true that if I had to list my favorite Holmes stories ("A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Speckled Band," "The Red-Headed League", "The Blue Carbuncle," "Silver Blaze," "The Musgrave Ritual") they all come from the first two collections. The introduction also points out that many of the stories in this collection have elements recycled from earlier stories: "The Six Napoleans" recapping aspects of "The Blue Carbuncle," "The Norwood Builder" using a trick from "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Second Stain" is reminiscent of "The Naval Treaty" and "The Solitary Cyclist" of "The Greek Interpreter."Still, reading this was a pleasure--if not so much as brilliant puzzle pieces, than just for the company of the wry Holmes and how he plays off Watson. I had to grin when Holmes whips off his disguise in "The Empty House" and Watson faints--and then at Holmes' account at how he faked his own death--observing how all of them who came with Watson came to "totally erroneous conclusions." I was intrigued by the puzzle of the stick-figure cipher in "The Dancing Men." I'm not about to forget the death by harpoon in "The Black Peter." I had to smile at Holmes ironic humor in his comments to Inspector Lestrade at the end of "Charles Augustus Milverton." And it's a great moment in "The Six Napoleons" when Lestrade says Scotland Yard is proud of Holmes. And it was touching to see the concern of the seemingly cold, logical Holmes for Watson in "The Abbey Grange." So yes, even though I'd recommend the earlier short story collections or the first three novels (especially The Hound of the Baskervilles over The Return of Sherlock Holmes, that's not to say there isn't still a lot to enjoy here.
    • 3/5
      Another collection of variable quality, although the female characters in these stories are largely wonderful, and a handful are kickass, self-sufficient women.

      Also, the canon support for a Holmes/Watson marriage is all over the place and nothing like subtle, but all in all there's relatively little of Watson in the book. He's narrating every page and he's present in all those scenes, but it seems like earlier books had more of him expressing his own self. The bits and pieces of them sniping at each other make me so fond because it's all too rare that we see that Watson is entirely able to hold his own next to Holmes, but he's self-censoring as narrator. Such interesting characterization. It makes him a great ninja of an unreliable narrator because ACD takes such pains to convince us that Watson is impeccably reliable. And yet... *g*

      I wish he'd written more novels.
    • 5/5
      Three years after Sherlock’s death at the hands of Moriarty, Dr. Watson is shocked to discover he’s actually alive and well! He was so shocked in fact he faints for the first and only time in his life. The story that follows explains Sherlock’s absence over the past couples years and his current predicament. Some of Moriarty’s agents are trying to find and kill him and they’ll stop at nothing to do so. The clever Holmes devises a plan to not only catch his enemies, but also to solve an open case for the police at the same time. **SPOILERS**Colonel Moran is Sherlock’s pursuer in this novella. He is an admired military man with a reputation as an skilled hunter. Sherlock compares Colonel Moran (to his face) to the very tigers he hunted for so many years. It must have been salt in the wound to someone so proud of his ability to hunt. Holmes had no qualms about insulting him and making sure he understood that he was now the captured prey. Clearly the brilliant Sherlock has returned. **SPOILERS OVER**BOTTOM LINE: An excellent story and a must read for anyone who finishes The Final Problem.  
    • 3/5
      After growing up on Sherlock Holmes movies, Sherlock Holmes parodies, Sherlock Holmes-inspired characters and plots, and all manner of Sherlock Holmes culture references, I figured I owed it to myself to actually read a real, live Sherlock Holmes book. Otherwise, I felt like a bit of a poser, as if I was taking the name of Sherlock in vain, kind of like people who say "let's get the hell out of Dodge" without even knowing that they're quoting...(Googles furiously)...the classic 1960s-70s television series Gunsmoke.

      I must say it was an interesting experience coming to these stories so late in life, as I simply kept shaking my head at how influential this stuff is. Yet it wasn't stuffy or stilted at all; the thirteen short episodes that make up this book were all brisk, readable, humorous, and fun. They have only the most tenuous continuity - they aren't even in chronological order - and the plots are very much of the cookie-cutter variety. What keeps you reading is just the drive to see who's lying and how Holmes is going to figure it out. Which, aside from an arrogant druggie protagonist, is just one more way House, M.D. robs Sherlock Holmes dry.

      Definitely a worthy read, especially if you snatch it free from Project Gutenberg, as I did.
    • 4/5
      Sherlock Holmes is back from the dead. There are some good mysteries here. I liked The Six Napoleons best as I worked out what was going on. There's also some very fine writing; The Solitary Cyclist in particular. Check out the alliteration and the patterned variations on C, S and their combinations. My friend Ed says they're pure chance, but I don't think so.
    • 5/5
      Sherlock Holmes is timeless! The baker's dozen of Adventures that appear in this book are: The Empty House, The Norwood Builder, The Dancing Men, The Solitary Cyclist, The Priory School, Black Peter, Charles Augustus Milverton, The Six Napoleons, The Three Students, The Golden Pince-nez, The Missing Three-quarter, The Abbey Grange, and The Second Stain.
    • 5/5
      Classic Sherlock Holmes cases to show the genius of the detective and Conan Doyle's writing. The anthology starts with the case that brings Holmes back from the dead (with lots of fan urging). Then Holmes runs his natural gambit of murder, blackmail, and missing people. With most short story collections, some are good, some are not. With this collection there were no are nots" for me. I enjoyed them all. I had the added benefit of watching the TV series with Jeremy Brett. It was nice to remember how true they had stayed to the original stories. Few changes were made so I was able to picture the events clearly in my head. It made for wonderful bedtime reading.
      "
    • 3/5
      This series of short stories is fun escapism. Not as sexist as the earlier stories, which is nice.
    • 5/5
      This is the third short story collection, and it felt like the best so far - or maybe I'm just getting more and more into this crime universe. Holmes is returning after his presumed death in the fatal encounter with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Fall (recounted in the last story of "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes". The collection here is a feast of good stories, most of them shows Sherlock Holmes at the top of his game with his brilliant deductive powers. Oh, how Lestrade glows in the second story but guess who gets the last laughter. My favorites were "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" , "Abbey Grange", "The Second Stain", "Six Napoleons", "Priory School" and "The Norwood Builder".I like the variety - some scary, some intriguing, some comic - most of them just trademark Sherlock-spectacular. Again the Gothic setting of Victorian London is a sheer pleasure. Also there are trips to large estates outside London and a visit at a university. The perfect chemistry between Holmes and Watson are one of the reasons for the success of these stories. Holmes always five steps ahead of them all, Watson trying to catch up and being surprised all the time. Brilliant. In one of the stories Holmes gets engaged:“You would not call me a marrying man, Watson?""No, indeed!""You'll be interested to hear that I'm engaged.""My dear fellow! I congrat——""To Milverton's housemaid.""Good heavens, Holmes!""I wanted information, Watson.""Surely you have gone too far?""It was a most necessary step. I am a plumber with a rising business, Escott, by name.”
    • 4/5
      A better collection of short stories (Puffin has published some of these stories in a collection called 'The Great Adventures of SH'. Includes one of my favourite short stories, 'The Dancing Men' and adventure based around a writing code featuring little stick men. All very much worth a read.
    • 3/5
      Short stories are easy to read - can pick it up and just read one story before bed - does make me take more time to read.Find I prefer the stories that are mysteries/puzzles, rather than murders - liked 'The Empty House' (& the way Holmes returned), 'The Priory School' and 'The Three Students' best.Really like the picture on the cover (one of my favourites in the series).Arthur Conan Doyle seems to like to give the stories a happy ending - even when someone is caught and has to leave the country, they planned to go anyway. ^_^
    • 4/5
      Took my time getting through this volume since there were so many stories, and I wanted time to appreciate them all. Reading these is fun, but I do agree with Sherlock's assessment that Watson leaves out too many details of how the cases are solved. ;) I would like more of the forensic science involved included.
    • 3/5
      Very good collection. The shorter works are by far superior to his longer ones as character development is not his forte. Short fiction complements these clever (yet not substantial) story lines.

    Book preview

    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Other Stories - Arthur Conan Doyle

    THE ADVENTURES OF

    SHERLOCK HOLMES, AND OTHER STORIES

    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Other Stories

    Introduction by Michael A. Cramer, PhD

    CANTERBURY CLASSICS

    San Diego

    Copyright ©2011 Canterbury Classics

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

    Canterbury Classics

    An imprint of Printers Row Publishing Group

    10350 Barnes Canyon Road, Suite 100, San Diego, CA 92121

    www.canterburyclassicsbooks.com

    Printers Row Publishing Group is a division of Readerlink Distribution Services, LLC.

    Canterbury Classics, A Novel Journal, and Word Cloud Classics are registered trademarks of Readerlink Distribution Services, LLC.

    All correspondence concerning the content of this book should be addressed to Canterbury Classics, Editorial Department, at the above address.

    Publisher: Peter Norton

    Associate Publisher: Ana Parker

    Publishing/Editorial Team: April Farr, Kelly Larsen, Kathryn Chipinka, Aaron Guzman

    Editorial Team: JoAnn Padgett, Melinda Allman

    Production Team: Jonathan Lopes, Rusty von Dyl

    eISBN: 978-1-60710-870-2

    eBook Edition: March 2013

    CONTENTS

    Introduction

    A Study in Scarlet

    Part I: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department

    Part II: The Country of the Saints

    The Sign of the Four

    Chapter 1: The Science of Deduction

    Chapter 2: The Statement of the Case

    Chapter 3: In Quest of a Solution

    Chapter 4: The Story of the Bald-Headed Man

    Chapter 5: The Tragedy of Pondicherry Lodge

    Chapter 6: Sherlock Holmes Gives a Demonstration

    Chapter 7: The Episode of the Barrel

    Chapter 8: The Baker Street Irregulars

    Chapter 9: A Break in the Chain

    Chapter 10: The End of the Islander

    Chapter 11: The Great Agra Treasure

    Chapter 12: The Strange Story of Jonathan Small

    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

    A Scandal in Bohemia

    The Red-Headed League

    A Case of Identity

    The Boscombe Valley Mystery

    The Five Orange Pips

    The Man with the Twisted Lip

    The Blue Carbuncle

    The Speckled Band

    The Engineer’s Thumb

    The Noble Bachelor

    The Beryl Coronet

    The Copper Beeches

    The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

    Silver Blaze

    The Yellow Face

    The Stockbroker’s Clerk

    The Gloria Scott

    The Musgrave Ritual

    The Reigate Squire

    The Crooked Man

    The Resident Patient

    The Greek Interpreter

    The Naval Treaty

    The Final Problem

    The Return of Sherlock Holmes

    The Empty House

    The Norwood Builder

    The Dancing Men

    The Solitary Cyclist

    The Priory School

    Black Peter

    Charles Augustus Milverton

    The Six Napoleons

    The Three Students

    The Golden Pince-Nez

    The Missing Three-Quarter

    The Abbey Grange

    The Second Stain

    The Hound of the Baskervilles

    Chapter 1: Mr. Sherlock Holmes

    Chapter 2: The Curse of the Baskervilles

    Chapter 3: The Problem

    Chapter 4: Sir Henry Baskerville

    Chapter 5: Three Broken Threads

    Chapter 6: Baskerville Hall

    Chapter 7: The Stapletons of Merripit House

    Chapter 8: First Report of Dr. Watson

    Chapter 9: The Light upon the Moor (Second Report of Dr. Watson)

    Chapter 10: Extract from the Diary of Dr. Watson

    Chapter 11: The Man on the Tor

    Chapter 12: Death on the Moor

    Chapter 13: Fixing the Nets

    Chapter 14: The Hound of the Baskervilles

    Chapter 15: A Retrospection

    The Valley of Fear

    Part I The Tragedy of Birlstone

    Part II The Scowrers

    His Last Bow

    Wisteria Lodge

    The Cardboard Box

    The Red Circle

    The Bruce-Partington Plans

    The Dying Detective

    The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax

    The Devil’s Foot

    His Last Bow

    Introduction

    The British biographer Hesketh Pearson, writing in 1947, observed that there are only four characters in literature who are known to every barman and dockworker in England, even if they have not read a word of the stories written about them: Romeo, Shylock, Robinson Crusoe, and Sherlock Holmes. He opines that it is because each of them is symbolic. Romeo stands for love, Shylock for avarice, Crusoe for adventure, and Holmes for sport. In Conan Doyle: His Life and His Art , Pearson writes: Few readers think of Holmes as a sportsman, but that is how he figures in the popular imagination; he is a tracker, a hunter-down, a combination of bloodhound, pointer, and bulldog, who runs people to earth as a foxhound does a fox; in fact, a sleuth. All this is true. In fact, popular culture has often slapped an Inverness cape and a deerstalker hat on a bloodhound, literally turning Holmes into a hound. But it is only half true, because to be a regular Sherlock Holmes is not to be a sportsman. It is to be a robot, a thinking machine who can deduce from the smallest bit of information everything about a person. Holmes is also more than just symbolic; he is iconic. Rather than compare him to literary figures like Romeo and Shylock, it is better to say that his place is among legendary British heroes, where he stands in the ranks of Robin Hood and King Arthur.

    Sherlock Holmes is more than just the subject of four novels and fifty-six short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (forty-four of which are published in this volume). His influence on literature and popular culture is unfathomable. Doctoral dissertations are written about him. A fictional character, he nonetheless has his own biographers. Reams of paper are devoted to books about Holmes and his influence on crime drama and pop culture, and on what he reveals about the Edwardian psyche. Hundreds of authors have continued on with Holmes stories and hundreds more have written parodies or pastiches. He has been paired with Sigmund Freud and Oscar Wilde, he has investigated Jack the Ripper and, during World War II—when Conan Doyle’s creation would have been in his nineties—he fought Nazis. He has been the inspiration for other characters in literature, film, and television: Lord Peter Wimsey, Nero Wolfe, Gregory House, Mr. Spock, and arguably Henry Higgins, to name just a few.

    The publication of the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, is as important a landmark in the history of detective fiction as was the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, both of which established important archetypes in detective fiction. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, often considered the first detective story, introduced the original gentleman detective, August Dupin. Many of the tropes used by Conan Doyle for Sherlock Holmes were first developed by Poe for Dupin, including his friendship with an often-astounded narrator. In fact, in A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle has Dr. Watson compare Holmes to Dupin and to Emilie Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq, another early detective. Holmes dismisses Dupin as too showy and Lecoq as a miserable bungler. Thus Conan Doyle states right out in the first story that the greatest literary detective is his own (in interviews, Conan Doyle often said these two characters were among his favorites—Holmes’s opinion is not so high). In The Maltese Falcon, Hammett, a real-life private detective, created a completely different type of character in Sam Spade, the hard-boiled private eye. In terms of influence on crime fiction, no other trio can claim to have been as important as Poe, Conan Doyle, and Hammett.

    Although he is originally a literary figure, it is through film and television that Sherlock Holmes’s impact has been most strongly felt. The sad fact is that many of us come to Sherlock Holmes through the movies or television. Conan Doyle’s books are something that we seek out later if we desire to know more about the stories or the character. It is sad because, as good as some of the movies and TV shows are, they cannot capture the mystery of Conan Doyle’s prose. (In my own case, it was seeing Basil Rathbone in The Hound of the Baskervilles on late-night television, which scared me out of my wits at eight years old.) According to the Internet Movie Database, as of October 2010, the character Sherlock Holmes has appeared in 232 different movies and television shows. That’s fifty more entries than Hamlet, 108 more than Superman, and only ninety-four less than Jesus Christ. The actors who have played Holmes include Roger Moore, Peter Cushing, Nicole Williamson, Peter O’Toole, Tom Baker, James D’Arcy, Jonathan Pryce, Rupert Everet, Edward Woodward, Raymond Massey, John Barrymore, Peter Cook, Frank Langella, Peter Lawford, Patrick MacNee, Christopher Plummer, Stewart Granger, Christopher Lee, Michael Caine, Charleton Heston, Jeremy Brett, and Robert Downey Jr. It is the American stage actor William Gillette, who was hired to doctor Conan Doyle’s play about Holmes, from whom we get the most lasting image of Holmes. It was Gillette, working from one of Sidney Padget’s drawings, who made the deerstalker cap and Inverness cape the standard Holmes costume. Gillette was so popular as Sherlock Holmes (he played the role onstage till he was eighty) that portraits of him as Holmes were used in The Strand and in Collier’s Magazine, as well as on some of Conan Doyle’s book covers. Orson Welles once said, It is too little to say that William Gillette resembles Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes looks exactly like William Gillette.

    These are the faces most people think of when they imagine Sherlock Holmes, and the screen versions are all most people know of Sherlock Holmes. So collections like this are important, because as odd as Conan Doyle’s Edwardian style may be to modern readers, in his prolific spinning of Holmes tales he gives us some of the greatest stories ever written.

    Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Conan Doyle

    Conan Doyle was an athletic man. He was tall, stocky, and muscular, with a boyish face that never seemed to age. For his whole adult life he sported a turned-up mustache and short hair, parted on the side and combed over in a playful shock. Graham Greene said it was a face you’d seen a thousand times in the pub. Barrel-chested and thick around the middle, usually wearing a three-piece suit, in every photograph Conan Doyle appears the perfect image of the prosperous Edwardian gentleman. He was an accomplished athlete. He played rugby and soccer, he boxed, and was an expert cricketer. He was one of the first people to bring skiing to Switzerland, and he was an avid golfer. In fact, his prolific output as a writer and his energetic pursuit of sport was much like another famous Edwardian of about the same age: Theodore Roosevelt. (Though the similarity goes only so far: in spite of his experience as a whaler, or perhaps because of it, Conan Doyle considered hunting, Roosevelt’s favorite sport, to be barbaric. Conan Doyle did fish, however, and was not shy of the inconsistency.)

    Sir Arthur Ignatius Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 22, 1859. Irish by descent, Scottish by birth, and English by choice, he was the quintessential British subject. He added Conan, the name of his godfather, later in life. He attended a Jesuit prep school and then Stonyhurst College. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University, advancing in 1861, and then went on to practice medicine while he finished his doctorate. As he was unable to get the scholarship he needed to support his studies, he would take a double class load one semester and then take a semester off to work as a surgeon’s assistant. In 1877 Conan Doyle spent time working as a clerk to Dr. Joseph Bell, personal surgeon to Queen Victoria and a teacher at Edinburgh. Bell was a pioneer of forensic pathology, the scientific study of the cause of death, and used to show off to his students by being able to deduce from clues on a person (living or dead) his occupation, his illnesses, and (of the corpse) how he died.

    Conan Doyle always craved adventure, so it’s no surprise that at one of these breaks in his schooling he signed up with a whaling ship. He was hired to be a ship’s doctor but turned out to be an excellent harpooner as well, and was paid out as both. After finishing medical school, his first job was as ship’s surgeon on a tramp steamer working the west coast of Africa. He only left the job because he realized that the life of a ship’s doctor was so seductive that he might end up doing it for the rest of his life. In 1882 he went into private practice, first with a former classmate in Plymouth and then, when that dissolved, on his own in Southsea. Later he studied the eye in Vienna and attempted to open a practice as an ophthalmologist in 1891. On the whole, his medical practices were a failure.

    He now seems destined to have been a writer. He began writing stories at age six. He edited newspapers while at school. He wrote verse and read every book he could get his hands on. And from very early on he knew and befriended writers. He met Thackeray when he was three years old. While at medical school, he began to publish some of his short stories and, as he had few patients, he returned to writing in Plymouth. His first big success was A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887. In it Conan Doyle, inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, introduced the character of Sherlock Holmes.

    In a way Conan Doyle and Holmes epitomized their times. The Victorian age was an age of great technological and scientific advancement, and this is reflected in the Holmes stories in many ways. Take travel, for example: Early on, most travel in the stories is done by horse-drawn cabs; by the time of His Last Bow, which takes place in 1914, Watson is able to act as chauffeur for Holmes in an automobile. (Conan Doyle was one of the first persons in England to own a car.) Conan Doyle, who served on both a tramp steamer and a whaler, writes convincingly about sailors and the sea, down to such minutiae as using shipping reports, sailing dates, and manifests in solving mysteries. But by far the most important means of transportation in the books—and, by reflection, in society—was the train. By the time the stories take place, suburban train travel and commuting had been well established in England. It was not quite a novelty but still seemed to fascinate Conan Doyle, at least to the extent that he made it a huge part of so many of his stories. They often take place in small country towns, rustic and sometimes superstitious. But they are not too distant. Holmes and Watson can get from Baker Street to the moors in an afternoon. This modern sense of mobility is important to the milieu of the tales. And like the trains, Holmes is a machine. He is precise and methodical. He adapts to the railway and shipping timetables as if they are part of his essence. Once set in motion, he is difficult to stop. Also like the trains, he brings modernity to the countryside.

    It was an era not only of science but of the scientific method. Darwin had applied the method to naturalism and come up with his theory of evolution. Marx was applying the method to economics and coming up with socialism. In Russia, Stanislavsky was applying it to acting and coming up with a method for that. What could be more natural than to apply the scientific method to criminology? Conan Doyle had witnessed this revolution firsthand while working for Joseph Bell, and in a very real way Sherlock Holmes is present at the beginning of modern criminology, using chemistry, biology, and a knowledge of soils, cigarette ash, plants, and poisons to solve mysteries. Holmes is both the first modern detective and, in a very real way, the quintessential modern man.

    In 1891 Conan Doyle was struggling at his eye practice and making his living by writing. While lying in bed recuperating from the flu, Conan Doyle realized that it was foolish to pursue a career as a doctor who wrote on occasion when no one wanted his services but everyone wanted to read his stories. After this he shuttered his practice (with no patients, he had already been writing full-time). Soon he was at the center of a vibrant literary scene in turn-of-the-century London made up of young athletic men who not only wrote about adventure but sought it out themselves. He corresponded with Robert Louis Stevenson, he golfed with Rudyard Kipling, and he played on a cricket team with A. E. W. Mason and J. M. Barrie. (According to Mason, they kept Conan Doyle around because he was the only one of them who could actually play.)

    Already he was making a substantial income as a writer. Although he did not particularly like the detective he had created, Conan Doyle found in Sherlock Holmes his meal ticket, the thing that gave him financial security and allowed him to write the serious literature he desired. In addition to the Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle wrote several historical novels, a series of science-fiction novels, horror fiction, critical essays, short stories, plays, poetry, and a well-received history of the Boer War, for which he had volunteered as an army surgeon, much like Watson. Conan Doyle was also a well-known spiritualist and is rumored to have been responsible for the Piltdown Man hoax, in which a human skull was joined to an orangutan jawbone and then passed off as a missing link. On occasion Conan Doyle even investigated crimes. But throughout his career, whenever he needed money, he returned to Holmes. Eventually he came to feel as though Holmes had taken over his life and prevented him from attaining the literary greatness he had sought. Conan Doyle far preferred his historical novels, like The White Company and Sir Nigel, medieval epics in the style of Sir Walter Scott. Sherlock Holmes was crime drama, which was too lowbrow for the aspirations of Conan Doyle. When Sir Henry Baskerville observed, I seem to have walked right into the thick of a dime novel, he was describing Conan Doyle’s own disdain toward the genre. However, while Conan Doyle’s historical fiction and the Professor Challenger stories are still popular among certain audiences, it was his potboiler Sherlock Holmes that became his most famous creation—indeed, one of the most famous literary creations of all time.

    Misters Holmes and Watson

    I found it! I found it! With this triumphant cry of eureka, the world was introduced to Sherlock Holmes. Mystery surrounded him from the very start. He had obviously just solved one, but we were not yet privy to it. Holmes is being introduced to Watson by a common friend, Stamford, who presents the additional mystery: Who is Holmes? Stamford knows nothing about him but obviously finds him a bit odd. Watson informs us that he is well over six feet tall, exceedingly thin, and has a surprisingly strong grip. His nose is hawklike and his jaw is square. His hands are stained with chemicals and scarred from the number of times he has cut himself, presumably to provide himself with blood for his experiments.

    Holmes is first encountered in a laboratory at a medical school. He is known for conducting strange experiments like beating a corpse with a stick to find out how long bruises can be inflicted after death. Nobody knows exactly what he is all about. He has unusual knowledge of crime and history trivia, and deep scientific knowledge of chemistry and biology, but has no idea that the earth travels around the sun and, what’s more, does not care. That knowledge is of no use to him. Like Albert Einstein later, Sherlock Holmes endeavors to keep his mind free of useless information—which makes the knowledge he does possess all the more strange. It turns out that the mystery he has just solved is how to identify bloodstains. The Holmes we meet is not just a detective but, like Joseph Bell, an early CSI.

    He is also young. When we meet him for the first time in A Study in Scarlet, Holmes is only twenty-seven years old—the same age as Conan Doyle when he wrote it. This Holmes is full of the enthusiasm of a young man just making his way in the world, not unlike Conan Doyle himself, who was struggling to establish his medical practice. He is full of energy and righteousness and a hope for the future, which over the course of time will gradually fade away. As he grows older, whether this is because the character develops or because Conan Doyle does, Holmes’s moods become deeper and darker, and his cynicism more pronounced.

    It is useless to talk of Holmes without speaking of Watson. The two are inseparable. They complement and complete each other. They first meet because both of them are looking for someone to share a flat with. Their mutual acquaintance Stamford introduces them, and they take up rooms in the famous flat at 221B Baker Street. From roommates they become sidekicks and eventually friends. Watson is practically Holmes’s only friend. The only other person Holmes gets close to is his elder brother, Mycroft. Just as Joseph Bell was the inspiration for Holmes, Conan Doyle himself in many ways was Dr. Watson. Both are medical men. Both were army surgeons. Both were solid, middle-class British gentlemen. Most of all, both were in a position to stare in wonder at the skills of the geniuses they worked with. The relationship is a common one among sidekicks—one analytical and mercurial, the other stalwart and true; one quiet, the other gregarious; one misanthropic, the other jovial; one a misogynist, the other a ladies’ man. Literary and filmic partners throughout history have played these roles together, from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

    The most important fact of the relationship is that it is through Watson’s eyes that we see Sherlock Holmes. Nearly all the stories are written in the first person from Watson’s point of view. Watson is the perfect interlocutor for Holmes: plainspoken, down-to-earth, and somewhat in awe of his friend’s genius. But Conan Doyle is clever enough to hint that our view of Holmes—that is to say, Watson’s—is not necessarily wholly accurate, and may be colored by the admiration and feeling of friendship that Watson has for Holmes. The Scotland Yard detectives, at least early on, consider Holmes to be pompous and vainglorious, and they resent his condescending attitude. Others call him a meddler or busybody. There is a grain of truth in all of these descriptions. Holmes, in his turn, does not like Watson’s style of storytelling, calling it too romantic.

    Holmes is not a very nice character on the whole. George Bernard Shaw once described him as a drug addict without a single amiable trait. Holmes is a cocaine addict and also uses morphine. The Sign of the Four begins with a long scene in which Watson watches his friend inject himself. Explaining his cocaine habit, Holmes says, My mind rebels at stagnation. He simply can’t stand to be bored. It is for this reason that he has invented his profession, and for this reason that, when there are no fascinating problems to occupy his mind, he relies upon the needle. On top of that, he is arrogant and egotistical and elitist. Watson finds these traits frustrating, but they are part of what makes Holmes so interesting. He does not need humanity because Watson provides it for him (although flashes of humanity do appear in Holmes’s facade from time to time).

    It is in the conflicts between Holmes and Watson that their characters come most alive. Holmes hates the style in which Watson chronicles his cases: Detection is, or should be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you had worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid. When Watson points out that the romance was there and all he did was report the facts, Holmes is unmoved. Some facts, he says, should be suppressed. He wants people to read of his cases to learn about detection, not to be entertained. It is odd, almost postmodern in a way, for Conan Doyle, within his writing, to maintain a running criticism of that writing. In The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, Holmes says, Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story instead of as a scientific exercise has ruined what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstrations. Meanwhile, Watson decries Holmes’s inability to see beauty in any person, instead seeing only evidence and data. You really are an automaton—a calculating machine, he says in The Sign of the Four. There is something positively inhuman in you at times!

    In fact, Holmes is not purely rational. He believes there must be some divine purpose in the world. He cannot reconcile all the misery he sees around him otherwise. He may not be religious, but he believes in some sort of divine power guiding the universe, or at least he hopes for one. In The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, he says, What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. Nor is Holmes infallible. Watson tells us that there are dozens of stories he hasn’t bothered to publish because they involve mysteries Holmes was unable to solve.

    The other neat thing about these stories is that they have all the aspects of memory. Although A Study in Scarlet and In the Valley of Fear contain long sections that are written in the third person with no indication of how Watson knows about these parts of the story, most of them are first-person narratives. A couple of them are old adventures that Holmes narrates to Watson, and His Last Bow is in the third person. Other than these, the stories are written as Watson’s memoirs. It is alluded to that they come from notes or from Watson’s journals, but occasionally Watson admits that he is writing from memory. Memory can be tricky. Holmes states that Watson’s writing makes too much of his skills and, while this could be false modesty, there is a ring of truth to it as well. Holmes is probably not as all-seeing as Watson makes him out to be. Furthermore, Watson may not be quite as stalwart, as honest, as faithful, or as charming as the picture drawn by his pen. As George Orwell said, A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying (a sentiment with which Sherlock Holmes would no doubt agree). Hesketh Pearson notes that the stories are full of inconsistencies and continuity errors: stories taking place at the wrong times, misattribution in later stories of events in earlier ones. Noting that Conan Doyle was far more careful in his historical novels, Pearson writes, The fact is, it never dawned on him that he was creating an immortal character. Perhaps this is true, but it is also another aspect of these stories that relates them to memory and makes them more real: like memory, they are sometimes messy and confused.

    The fictional memoir was an extremely popular literary style in nineteenth-century literature. Treasure Island (1881) and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), by Robert Louis Stevenson, and Huckleberry Finn (1881), by Mark Twain, are just three examples from the same period. After Sherlock Holmes, first person became a popular style for detective fiction, frequently through the eyes of a sidekick. Although this is often attributed to Conan Doyle, he had taken this technique from Poe. As with all memoir, there is an element of nostalgia to the stories as well. While most of them were written after 1901, most of them are set in the 1880s or 1890s. They are products of the twentieth century but are about nineteenth-century Victorian England. The technological changes that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century—telephones, motion pictures, automobiles, airplanes, etc.—are going on around Holmes and, indeed, he is a part of those changes. But most of the stories take place in the time just before this technological explosion. Holmes’s London is the recently lost world of hansom cabs and gas lighting.

    Some minor characters appear in multiple stories and have become part of the Holmes pantheon. Holmes’s elder brother Mycroft is a creation of Conan Doyle’s almost as interesting as Sherlock himself. Mycroft, who has a mysterious job with the government, is even smarter than Sherlock and a better detective. When Sherlock is in real trouble, it is Mycroft to whom he turns. Taller than Holmes and corpulent, he almost never leaves his chair at the Diogenes Club. Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard first appears as a bungling official in A Study in Scarlet but by The Hound of the Baskervilles he and Holmes have gained a mutual respect. Lestrade, ever animalistic, changes over time as well, being described as rat-faced, ferretlike, and a bulldog of a man.

    Like Lestrade, both Holmes and Watson change a great deal over time. Holmes becomes addicted to cocaine. Watson marries and then is widowed. Holmes fakes his own death and goes to live in Tibet with the mystics. He comes back and gives up ordinary mysteries, becoming instead a counterintelligence agent. Watson goes on to a successful medical practice but then moves back into Baker Street. Holmes goes off to become a beekeeper in the country, returning only when the crown has need of him. We meet them in their twenties, and the oldest we see them is in their sixties in His Last Bow, when Holmes and Watson are working against the Germans during World War I. As the stories go on, Watson gets thicker and Holmes gets thinner, and both grow weary of the world, but they bring out in each other the same energy, love of mystery, and sense of righteousness that they felt as young men trying to solve a ghastly murder in a gaslit London.

    Conan Doyle’s Formula

    Just as Sherlock Holmes had a formula for discovering bloodstains, Conan Doyle had a formula for writing mysteries. All detective stories rely on a backstory. They usually begin with the discovery of a crime—a body on the floor, an empty jewelry box. The action on the page is the discovery of the facts of the case, but the action of the story itself has already happened. So in a very real way mysteries start at the end and the detective reveals the story to the reader as he learns it through investigation. Nowhere in literature was that more explicitly explained than in Sherlock Holmes, for Holmes lays out the formula himself. He declares himself to be a consulting detective, a profession that he has invented. People come to him and tell him their problems and he solves them, ideally without leaving his flat. As Holmes often says, he comes in at the end of the story and reasons backward, looking at what has happened and deducing what came before by figuring out the most likely series of events to lead to the crime in question.

    The stories nearly all begin with Holmes and Watson in the sitting room of their flat at Baker Street eating their breakfasts and reading the paper. An item in the paper or the arrival of a letter foreshadows the coming of a client with a mystery to be solved. At that session the client tells the backstory and Holmes attempts to make sense of it. Because most of the action has already taken place, we are only there for the denouement. In The Solitary Cyclist, the story involves a plot to marry an heiress, hatched months before in South Africa. In A Scandal in Bohemia, it started with an affair conducted years before by a member of the Bohemian royal family who has come to Holmes because he is now being blackmailed. Sometimes the stories go back generations. In The Musgrave Ritual (one of the stories from his past that Holmes relates to Watson) and The Hound of the Baskervilles, the events go all the way back to the seventeenth century. In all of these cases the actual story, the relationships, and the conflict leading up to the crime are all revealed at the end of Holmes’s investigation, either by the detective himself or, often, by the criminal making a confession.

    There are a few exceptions. A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear include long sections written in the third person with no indication of how Watson heard about them. In The Final Problem, there is almost no plot to reveal. We know Holmes has been investigating Professor Moriarty and that the police will soon arrest his gang, but that part is unimportant. That is only a setup for Holmes’s two confrontations with Moriarty, first in the flat on Baker Street and the second at the ledge overlooking Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. It is Watson, employing the techniques he has learned from Holmes, who figures out and reveals what happened. That story takes place in the moment.

    It is also important to note that when we read these stories, we are not reading them in their original form. Most of the Holmes stories were originally published in The Strand magazine. Two of the novels were serialized, with a chapter appearing in each issue. Conan Doyle realized that since his audience was mostly reading his stories on the train while commuting into the city, it would be better if they could read each story in one sitting. Conan Doyle claims to have come up with this idea on his own, but in doing so he single-handedly advanced the popularity of the short story.

    The Holmes stories are mysteries, and it is as mysteries that they gained their fame, but there is another aspect to the Holmes stories that is often overlooked. They are often terrifying. Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound! Even today, reading these words, they send a shiver up my spine. It is not the shudder of fear with which Dr. Watson greeted them. Rather it is a thrill, the anticipation of excitement yet to come and the memory of excitement past. The Hound of the Baskervilles stands out among the Holmes stories for several reasons. In it Holmes comes closest to taking on the supernatural. Holmes, a man of science, is dismissive of the supernatural aspect of the story (an interesting fact given that Conan Doyle himself was a spiritualist who believed in fairies and demons), but the fact remains that The Hound of the Baskervilles is a ghost story, and a particularly scary one. Who, having read it, could walk across the moors of northern England and not glance this way and that, checking to make sure the demon hound is not about? Who can hear the deep-throated baying of a large dog and not imagine the giant hellhound hot on his heels, breathing phosphorescent fire?

    Conan Doyle may even have been a better writer of horror than he was of mystery. There is something of the penny dreadful in the Holmes tales, those cheap stories of murder and mayhem which were so popular in London in the nineteenth century, and which told of ghosts and of serial killers—whether real, like Jack the Ripper, or based on legend, like Sweeney Todd. Conan Doyle never shies away from the corpse. He describes it in detail through the eyes of a doctor (Conan Doyle himself had seen dozens of corpses at Edinburgh). In The Sign of the Four, Watson relates, I stooped to the hole and recoiled in horror. Moonlight was streaming into the room and it was bright with a vague and shifty radiance. Looking straight at me, and suspended, as it were, in the air, for all beneath was shadow, hung a face—the very face of our companion Thadeus ... The features were set, however, in a horrible smile, a fixed and unnatural grin. Later, after forcing the door, they see the whole body: He was stiff and cold, and had been dead many hours. It seemed to me that not only his features but all his limbs were twisted and turned in the most fantastic fashion.

    It is possible to divide the Holmes stories into those that come before The Hound of the Baskervilles, and those that came after. Prior to The Hound of the Baskervilles, Conan Doyle had taken the detective as far as he thought he could. He had finished writing Holmes and had sent him into retirement in The Final Problem. The Hound of the Baskervilles, one of only four novels, was published before Conan Doyle brought Holmes back to life. Before Hound, Conan Doyle is playing with the character, experimenting, exploring the mystery genre, and, frankly, reinventing it. He is writing Holmes because he wants to. The stories proceed in chronological order, as we experience with Dr. Watson his growing admiration for his friend. Then, frustrated with Holmes’s popularity, Conan Doyle kills him off, desiring to move on to other, more serious writing. Then in 1901, as if for one last hurrah, comes The Hound of the Baskervilles, his most popular (and I would argue best) story by far. Hound was written in response to the popular demand for more Holmes. It was three more years before he brought Holmes back from death, and then only reluctantly, in The Empty House. After Hound, Conan Doyle is writing Holmes under protest. Some of his best work comes in this period, but it is more formulaic. Conan Doyle is now writing mostly for the check. The tales jump back and forth in time. Some are written as recent adventures and some as adventures that took place years before. He has stuck to the formula, and it changes little. Many plots seem recycled, and he uses some devices over and over again—the wax bust of himself, the note passed to someone showing he knows their secret, the dramatic removal of his disguise. The stories spend so much time going back and forth between London and the country one sometimes gets the impression that no interesting crime happens in the gray and grimy city, and all the real criminals are out on the moors. But this adds to the mystery both for Watson and for the audience, as the country is a pastoral place, but also a little wild.

    Nonetheless, the later stories still have the same excitement they always had. They give us a firsthand view of England at the height of the empire, including its fascination with technology and crime. They present the same intractable problems and the same amazing solutions, and are pursued by the same two iconic characters. Who better to accompany us across the blasted heath on the heels of a murderer than Holmes and Watson?

    After Conan Doyle

    Conan Doyle retired Holmes several times (once by killing him) and continued to bring him back. While the latest the character appears in Conan Doyle’s original work is in 1914, Sherlock Holmes has never really left us. Amateur and professional authors alike write new adventures for him. New stories and old are filmed for him. He has appeared in Westerns, science fiction, war stories, and the Victorian-style science fiction genre known as steampunk.

    But his real legacy is in the detective literature of the twentieth century. By making detective fiction so lucrative for himself, Conan Doyle created an entire industry and genre of literature, and all mystery writers who came after him owe him their careers. His influence on later writers is huge. Dorothy Sayers, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, wrote scholarly essays about Holmes and even included him in a story with Lord Peter as a little boy. Most of the later detectives (as opposed to the private eyes) employ his methods. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple have the same analytic style. Wimsey, more gentleman than Holmes and more of a detective, is a direct heir to his legacy. Conan Doyle is also likely the first person to use the term red herring in mystery writing to describe a false lead, in The Case of the Priory School. Speaking of a lead the police have given up as false, Holmes says, It would be well to allow the people in your neighbourhood to imagine that the inquiry is still going on in Liverpool, or wherever else that red herring led your pack.

    Some mystery fans have postulated that Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe is actually Holmes’s offspring from an affair with Irene Adler, the antagonist in A Scandal in Bohemia. Wolfe is like Mycroft, corpulent and brilliant and rarely leaving his favorite chair in his Manhattan brownstone. His Watson is Archie Goodwin, the sidekick narrator in awe of his partner. Goodwin, a detective more in the Sam Spade mold, does all of Wolfe’s legwork. He also keeps a portrait of Sherlock Holmes above his desk. In this way, Stout managed to combine tropes from the two lines of detective fiction, the gentleman detective, à la Holmes, and the hard-boiled private eye. These writers—and hundreds of others—attest to the legacy of Sherlock Holmes.

    A Study in Scarlet

    A Study in Scarlet

    PART I

    Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department.

    CHAPTER 1

    Mr. Sherlock Holmes

    In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy’s country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Kandahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties.

    The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster. I was removed from my brigade and attached to the Berkshires, with whom I served at the fatal battle of Maiwand. There I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery. I should have fallen into the hands of the murderous Ghazis had it not been for the devotion and courage shown by Murray, my orderly, who threw me across a pack-horse, and succeeded in bringing me safely to the British lines.

    Worn with pain, and weak from the prolonged hardships which I had undergone, I was removed, with a great train of wounded sufferers, to the base hospital at Peshawar. Here I rallied, and had already improved so far as to be able to walk about the wards, and even to bask a little upon the verandah, when I was struck down by enteric fever, that curse of our Indian possessions. For months my life was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back to England. I was dispatched, accordingly, in the troopship Orontes, and landed a month later on Portsmouth jetty, with my health irretrievably ruined, but with permission from a paternal government to spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it.

    I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air—or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I ought. So alarming did the state of my finances become, that I soon realized that I must either leave the metropolis and rusticate somewhere in the country, or that I must make a complete alteration in my style of living. Choosing the latter alternative, I began by making up my mind to leave the hotel, and to take up my quarters in some less pretentious and less expensive domicile.

    On the very day that I had come to this conclusion, I was standing at the Criterion Bar, when someone tapped me on the shoulder, and turning round I recognized young Stamford, who had been a dresser under me at Bart’s. The sight of a friendly face in the great wilderness of London is a pleasant thing indeed to a lonely man. In old days Stamford had never been a particular crony of mine, but now I hailed him with enthusiasm, and he, in his turn, appeared to be delighted to see me. In the exuberance of my joy, I asked him to lunch with me at the Holborn, and we started off together in a hansom.

    Whatever have you been doing with yourself, Watson? he asked in undisguised wonder, as we rattled through the crowded London streets. You are as thin as a lath and as brown as a nut.

    I gave him a short sketch of my adventures, and had hardly concluded it by the time that we reached our destination.

    Poor devil! he said, commiseratingly, after he had listened to my misfortunes. What are you up to now?

    Looking for lodgings, I answered. Trying to solve the problem as to whether it is possible to get comfortable rooms at a reasonable price.

    That’s a strange thing, remarked my companion; you are the second man today that has used that expression to me.

    And who was the first? I asked.

    A fellow who is working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital. He was bemoaning himself this morning because he could not get someone to go halves with him in some nice rooms which he had found, and which were too much for his purse.

    By Jove! I cried, if he really wants someone to share the rooms and the expense, I am the very man for him. I should prefer having a partner to being alone.

    Young Stamford looked rather strangely at me over his wine-glass. You don’t know Sherlock Holmes yet, he said; perhaps you would not care for him as a constant companion.

    Why, what is there against him?

    Oh, I didn’t say there was anything against him. He is a little queer in his ideas—an enthusiast in some branches of science. As far as I know he is a decent fellow enough.

    A medical student, I suppose? said I.

    No—I have no idea what he intends to go in for. I believe he is well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has never taken out any systematic medical classes. His studies are very desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of out-of-the way knowledge which would astonish his professors.

    Did you never ask him what he was going in for? I asked.

    No; he is not a man that it is easy to draw out, though he can be communicative enough when the fancy seizes him.

    I should like to meet him, I said. If I am to lodge with anyone, I should prefer a man of studious and quiet habits. I am not strong enough yet to stand much noise or excitement. I had enough of both in Afghanistan to last me for the remainder of my natural existence. How could I meet this friend of yours?

    He is sure to be at the laboratory, returned my companion. He either avoids the place for weeks, or else he works there from morning to night. If you like, we shall drive round together after luncheon.

    Certainly, I answered, and the conversation drifted away into other channels.

    As we made our way to the hospital after leaving the Holborn, Stamford gave me a few more particulars about the gentleman whom I proposed to take as a fellow-lodger.

    You mustn’t blame me if you don’t get on with him, he said; I know nothing more of him than I have learned from meeting him occasionally in the laboratory. You proposed this arrangement, so you must not hold me responsible.

    If we don’t get on it will be easy to part company, I answered. It seems to me, Stamford, I added, looking hard at my companion, that you have some reason for washing your hands of the matter. Is this fellow’s temper so formidable, or what is it? Don’t be mealy-mouthed about it.

    It is not easy to express the inexpressible, he answered with a laugh. Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes—it approaches to cold-bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness. He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.

    Very right too.

    Yes, but it may be pushed to excess. When it comes to beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick, it is certainly taking rather a bizarre shape.

    Beating the subjects!

    Yes, to verify how far bruises may be produced after death. I saw him at it with my own eyes.

    And yet you say he is not a medical student?

    No. Heaven knows what the objects of his studies are. But here we are, and you must form your own impressions about him. As he spoke, we turned down a narrow lane and passed through a small side-door, which opened into a wing of the great hospital. It was familiar ground to me, and I needed no guiding as we ascended the bleak stone staircase and made our way down the long corridor with its vista of whitewashed wall and dun-coloured doors. Near the further end a low arched passage branched away from it and led to the chemical laboratory.

    This was a lofty chamber, lined and littered with countless bottles. Broad, low tables were scattered about, which bristled with retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps, with their blue flickering flames. There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure. I’ve found it! I’ve found it, he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand. I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by haemoglobin, and by nothing else. Had he discovered a gold mine, greater delight could not have shone upon his features.

    Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, said Stamford, introducing us.

    How are you? he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.

    How on earth did you know that? I asked in astonishment.

    Never mind, said he, chuckling to himself. The question now is about haemoglobin. No doubt you see the significance of this discovery of mine?

    It is interesting, chemically, no doubt, I answered, but practically—

    Why, man, it is the most practical medico-legal discovery for years. Don’t you see that it gives us an infallible test for bloodstains. Come over here now! He seized me by the coat-sleeve in his eagerness, and drew me over to the table at which he had been working. Let us have some fresh blood, he said, digging a long bodkin into his finger, and drawing off the resulting drop of blood in a chemical pipette. Now, I add this small quantity of blood to a litre of water. You perceive that the resulting mixture has the appearance of pure water. The proportion of blood cannot be more than one in a million. I have no doubt, however, that we shall be able to obtain the characteristic reaction. As he spoke, he threw into the vessel a few white crystals, and then added some drops of a transparent fluid. In an instant the contents assumed a dull mahogany colour, and a brownish dust was precipitated to the bottom of the glass jar.

    Ha! ha! he cried, clapping his hands, and looking as delighted as a child with a new toy. What do you think of that?

    It seems to be a very delicate test, I remarked.

    Beautiful! beautiful! The old guaiacum test was very clumsy and uncertain. So is the microscopic examination for blood corpuscles. The latter is valueless if the stains are a few hours old. Now, this appears to act as well whether the blood is old or new. Had this test been invented, there are hundreds of men now walking the earth who would long ago have paid the penalty of their crimes.

    Indeed! I murmured.

    Criminal cases are continually hinging upon that one point. A man is suspected of a crime months perhaps after it has been committed. His linen or clothes are examined, and brownish stains discovered upon them. Are they blood stains, or mud stains, or rust stains, or fruit stains, or what are they? That is a question which has puzzled many an expert, and why? Because there was no reliable test. Now we have the Sherlock Holmes’ test, and there will no longer be any difficulty.

    His eyes fairly glittered as he spoke, and he put his hand over his heart and bowed as if to some applauding crowd conjured up by his imagination.

    You are to be congratulated, I remarked, considerably surprised at his enthusiasm.

    There was the case of Von Bischoff at Frankfort last year. He would certainly have been hung had this test been in existence. Then there was Mason of Bradford, and the notorious Muller, and Lefevre of Montpellier, and Samson of new Orleans. I could name a score of cases in which it would have been decisive.

    You seem to be a walking calendar of crime, said Stamford with a laugh. You might start a paper on those lines. Call it the ‘Police News of the Past.’

    Very interesting reading it might be made, too, remarked Sherlock Holmes, sticking a small piece of plaster over the prick on his finger. I have to be careful, he continued, turning to me with a smile, for I dabble with poisons a good deal. He held out his hand as he spoke, and I noticed that it was all mottled over with similar pieces of plaster, and discoloured with strong acids.

    We came here on business, said Stamford, sitting down on a high three-legged stool, and pushing another one in my direction with his foot. My friend here wants to take diggings, and as you were complaining that you could get no one to go halves with you, I thought that I had better bring you together.

    Sherlock Holmes seemed delighted at the idea of sharing his rooms with me. I have my eye on a suite in Baker Street, he said, which would suit us down to the ground. You don’t mind the smell of strong tobacco, I hope?

    I always smoke ‘ship’s’ myself, I answered.

    That’s good enough. I generally have chemicals about, and occasionally do experiments. Would that annoy you?

    By no means.

    Let me see—what are my other shortcomings. I get in the dumps at times, and don’t open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I’ll soon be right. What have you to confess now? It’s just as well for two fellows to know the worst of one another before they begin to live together.

    I laughed at this cross-examination. I keep a bull pup, I said, and I object to rows because my nerves are shaken, and I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours, and I am extremely lazy. I have another set of vices when I’m well, but those are the principal ones at present.

    Do you include violin-playing in your category of rows? he asked, anxiously.

    It depends on the player, I answered. A well-played violin is a treat for the gods—a badly-played one—

    Oh, that’s all right, he cried, with a merry laugh. I think we may consider the thing as settled—that is, if the rooms are agreeable to you.

    When shall we see them?

    Call for me here at noon tomorrow, and we’ll go together and settle everything, he answered.

    All right—noon exactly, said I, shaking his hand.

    We left him working among his chemicals, and we walked together towards my hotel. By the way, I asked suddenly, stopping and turning upon Stamford, how the deuce did he know that I had come from Afghanistan?

    My companion smiled an enigmatical smile. That’s just his little peculiarity, he said. A good many people have wanted to know how he finds things out.

    Oh! a mystery is it? I cried, rubbing my hands. This is very piquant. I am much obliged to you for bringing us together. ‘The proper study of mankind is man,’ you know.

    You must study him, then, Stamford said, as he bade me good-bye. You’ll find him a knotty problem, though. I’ll wager he learns more about you than you about him. Good-bye.

    Good-bye, I answered, and strolled on to my hotel, considerably interested in my new acquaintance.

    CHAPTER 2

    The Science of Deduction

    We met next day as he had arranged, and inspected the rooms at No. 221B, Baker Street, of which he had spoken at our meeting. They consisted of a couple of comfortable bedrooms and a single large airy sitting-room, cheerfully furnished, and illuminated by two broad windows. So desirable in every way were the apartments, and so moderate did the terms seem when divided between us, that the bargain was concluded upon the spot, and we at once entered into possession. That very evening I moved my things round from the hotel, and on the following morning Sherlock Holmes followed me with several boxes and portmanteaus. For a day or two we were busily employed in unpacking and laying out our property to the best advantage. That done, we gradually began to settle down and to accommodate ourselves to our new surroundings.

    Holmes was certainly not a difficult man to live with. He was quiet in his ways, and his habits were regular. It was rare for him to be up after ten at night, and he had invariably breakfasted and gone out before I rose in the morning. Sometimes he spent his day at the chemical laboratory, sometimes in the dissecting-rooms, and occasionally in long walks, which appeared to take him into the lowest portions of the City. Nothing could exceed his energy when the working fit was upon him; but now and again a reaction would seize him, and for days on end he would lie upon the sofa

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