The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

About this book

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is the first collection of short stories about Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective. Holmes had already appeared in two novels, A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of the Four (1890), without making much impression. It was the monthly stories in The Strand Magazine, beginning in July 1891 with “A Scandal in Bohemia,” that made Holmes a popular phenomenon. The twelve stories published over the following year were gathered into this volume in 1892.

The collection established the pattern that nearly all later detective fiction has followed in some form: a brilliant investigator, a loyal narrator who is a step behind, a client with a puzzling problem, and a solution reached by reasoning from small details. Doyle’s decision to write self-contained stories with recurring characters, rather than a serial that required readers to follow every installment, suited magazine publishing and helped make the Strand a success.

The story

Each story is narrated by Dr. John Watson, Holmes’s friend and former fellow lodger at 221B Baker Street. A visitor arrives with a problem that the police cannot or will not solve, Holmes draws conclusions from the visitor’s appearance and account, and the two set out to investigate. Several of the best-known stories are here, including “A Scandal in Bohemia,” which introduces Irene Adler; “The Red-Headed League,” built around an absurd job advertisement; “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” a locked-room mystery in a country house; and “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” which turns on a stolen gem found inside a Christmas goose.

Not every case involves a crime, and not every case ends with an arrest. Part of the appeal is that Holmes is interested in the puzzle, and Doyle is willing to let a story close on an unexpected note.

Themes and historical context

The stories are set in the London of the 1880s and 1890s, with its hansom cabs, gas lamps, telegrams, and railway timetables, and much of the pleasure for modern readers is the detail of that world. Doyle had trained as a doctor, and he said he modeled Holmes’s method partly on Joseph Bell, a surgeon who taught him in Edinburgh and who was known for diagnosing patients from their appearance.

Holmes’s method, which he calls deduction, is a dramatization of the Victorian faith in observation and scientific reasoning. The stories also reflect anxieties of the period: respectable families with secrets, fortunes made in the colonies, and the gap between appearance and reality in a city where strangers constantly judged one another by dress and manner.

The stories were an immediate success in the Strand and in book form, and demand for more was so strong that Doyle, who wanted to write historical novels, eventually tried to kill Holmes off in 1893 and was pressed by readers to bring him back.

Who should read it

The stories are short, usually around 8,000 to 10,000 words, and each stands alone, so the book can be read in any order or dipped into. The prose is clear and brisk, with little that will trouble a modern reader beyond some period vocabulary. It is a natural first book for anyone curious about classic detective fiction and a good choice for readers who find long Victorian novels daunting. Expect clever puzzles and strong atmosphere rather than deep character development; Holmes and Watson are drawn in confident strokes and stay largely the same from story to story.

Edition notes

Project Gutenberg #1661 was prepared by an anonymous volunteer and Jose Menendez. It contains the twelve stories of the 1892 collection.