Each set of stories engages a convenient spy/source for Holmes, but the gang or street kids in the first is my favourite. The inconsistencies bugged me: Watson marries, then suddenly moves back with Holmes, moves out again, but no mention is ever made of his wife afterwards. Much more readable than I expected! The time period evokes Dickens, but the writing is so not Dickens.

Included in this volume are the fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, and the thirty-three stories comprising The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow, and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. What can have happened to produce such uncharacteristic behavior in the world’s greatest detective?Īlthough, like all of Holmes’s adventures, these stories are set in the late Victorian era, they were written in the twentieth century. And, on one memorable occasion, he acts very unlike the gentleman we know him to be. At other times, he knowingly breaks the law.

At times he takes the law into his own hands. The Holmes who now scours the streets of London and tramps across the English countryside is as keenly observant and nimble of mind as ever, but his patience with British justice is wearing thin. Only in 1903 was Sherlock Holmes “resurrected” in his first new short story in ten years, “The Adventure of the Empty House.” But Holmes has changed. Doyle resisted for nearly eight years before publishing The Hound of the Baskervilles, a reminiscence set two years before Holmes’s fatal fall. After Sherlock Holmes “died” in 1893 at the Reichenbach Falls at the end of the story “The Final Problem,” Arthur Conan Doyle was inundated with pleas from fans around the world to revive him.

The complete sherlock holmes volume 2