1. A Study in Scarlet
London, 1881. Dr John Watson returns from army service in the Second Anglo-Afghan War with his health damaged and his finances reduced. Sharing rooms at 221B Baker Street introduces him to Sherlock Holmes, an eccentric consulting detective whose experiments in chemistry and close reading of physical…
1. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
The final Sherlock Holmes collection brings together twelve cases first published during the 1920s. Holmes confronts a murderous aristocratic seducer in “The Illustrious Client”, investigates an apparently supernatural attack in “The Sussex Vampire”, unravels the disappearance of a valuable jewel in “The Mazarin Stone” and examines…
2. The Sign of the Four
London, 1888. Mary Morstan asks Holmes to discover why her father disappeared after returning from the Andaman Islands and why an unknown benefactor has sent her a valuable pearl each year. A summons from Thaddeus Sholto leads Holmes, Watson and Mary to Pondicherry Lodge, where Bartholomew…
3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects twelve cases narrated by Dr Watson from the detective’s Baker Street practice. The volume opens with A Scandal in Bohemia, in which Irene Adler defeats Holmes’s attempt to recover a compromising photograph, and continues through frauds, disappearances, inherited threats and…
4. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes presents eleven investigations that broaden both Holmes’s career and personal history. Silver Blaze concerns a missing racehorse and a murdered trainer; The Gloria Scott and The Musgrave Ritual reveal two of Holmes’s earliest cases; and The Greek Interpreter introduces his more…
5. The Hound of the Baskervilles
Dr James Mortimer asks Holmes to protect Sir Henry Baskerville, the new heir to a Devon estate shadowed by a family legend. Sir Charles Baskerville has died on the path beside Baskerville Hall, apparently terrified by something on the moor, and a gigantic hound is said…
6. The Return of Sherlock Holmes
The Return of Sherlock Holmes restores the detective to Baker Street after his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls. In The Empty House, Holmes explains how he survived his encounter with Moriarty and returns in disguise to defeat Colonel Sebastian Moran, the remaining marksman of the…
7. The Valley of Fear
Sherlock Holmes receives a ciphered warning from Porlock, an informer inside Professor Moriarty’s organisation, that John Douglas of Birlstone Manor is in danger. Before Holmes can act, Douglas is found shot in a locked room at his moated Sussex house. A missing wedding ring, a card…
8. His Last Bow
His Last Bow gathers later cases from Holmes’s career, moving from murder and disappearance to threats involving international politics and modern technology. Wisteria Lodge begins in 1892 with a killing connected to the former dictatorship of the fictional Central American state of San Pedro; The Bruce-Partington…