The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

I don’t know if anyone knows the rest of that joke. I have a feeling that perhaps no one does. The crime-busting duo created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (though he wasn’t a sir in those days) set the template for every one thereafter, and ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ is the original collection of the first twelve Holmes short stories published between 1891 and 1892. Some of these adventures are among the most famous (‘The Blue Carbuncle,’ ‘The Speckled Band’) and the cases range from trivial to imperative; deadly to comfortable; legendary to pointless. As the stories are presented in their original order, as the fictional scribe Watson ...  Read the complete review

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a hugely entertaining and totally absorbing book which covers twelve of Sherlock Holmes' investigations originally published in The Strand magazine. Holmes adventures are fascinating, revealing as they do the dark underbelly of Victorian society and many of them would create lurid headlines were they to actually occur today, even Holmes himself is not free from scandal when he is revealed by Watson to be of all things, a cocaine addict in A Scandal in Bohemia. From his battle of the sexes with the resourceful adventuress Miss Irene Adler in, A Scandal in Bohemia, to his foiling of the criminal intentions of the ...  Read the complete review

A few months ago, I went out and bought the complete works of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. £7.99 reduced from £30 odd quid. What a bargain!!! I am not even half way through this bargain purchase as Doyle was such a prolific writer, but of the stories I have read so far I have been very impressed. Like Mr Creek, strange and mysterious things gravitate towards Sherlock Holmes and through his amazing powers of logic and deduction, he solves each crime. It is fascinating to read the reasoning behind each of the puzzles as revealed slowly throughout each book and then in depth towards the end. I've lost count of the number of ...  Read the complete review

To discuss and review the Sherlock Holmes canon in its entirity feels almost pointless as the books have become so universally known that, for example, a large proportion of the English population can identify the lead character from a silhouette (in some cases even if they have not read the books). Given that the stories were written (in part) two centuries back, this is no mean feat. That they still exist today is a tribute to the resonance of the characters and the appealing accessibility of some marvellous storytelling. Indeed when the modern vogue for detectives and crime stories is considered much can have a direct causal link back to these short stories and novels ...  Read the complete review

It's been several years since I read the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, collected in three separate volumes each costing a pound. It works out at a very cheap way to get a lot of stories, admitedly in my copies they're reproductions from the originals in Strand Magazine, which means that the print is very fine and can be hard to read. Sherlock Holmes is familiar to most of us from numerous incarnations on TV and film, certainly that's how I first encountered the character. Reading the short stories reveals the character isn't quite as stereotyped as the modern representations, but he's pretty close. Holmes is a genius who can solve any crime ...  Read the complete review