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Home / Series / Sherlock Holmes

Series

Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon follows the consulting detective and Dr John Watson through four novels and five principal short-story collections. Beginning with their meeting in A Study in Scarlet, the sequence establishes Holmes’s method of close observation, forensic experiment and deductive reasoning as he investigates murder, theft, blackmail, disappearance and political intrigue in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

The books also trace the partnership itself: Watson moves from fascinated observer to trusted collaborator, while Holmes confronts Professor Moriarty, disappears after the struggle at Reichenbach and later returns to Baker Street. The Hound of the Baskervilles adds Gothic atmosphere on Dartmoor, The Valley of Fear connects a country-house murder to industrial violence in Gilded Age America, and His Last Bow carries Holmes into intelligence work during the July Crisis of 1914. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes completes the nine-volume canon with twelve of Doyle’s final Holmes stories.

Reading order

Books in this series (9 books)

A Study in Scarlet cover

#1 – A Study in Scarlet

Arthur Conan Doyle

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…

His Last Bow cover

#8 – His Last Bow

Arthur Conan Doyle

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…