Product Description

Amid the foggy streets of sinister London and the even more sinister countryside, Holmes and Watson once more solve the unsolvable. This book is a collection of stories, including - "A Scandal in Bohemia", "A Case of Identity", "The Red-Headed League" and "The Boscombe Valley Mystery".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7916 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh where he qualified as a doctor, but it was his writing which brought him fame, with the creation of Sherlock Holmes, the first scientific detective. He was also a convert to spiritualism and a social reformer who used his investigative skills to prove the innocence of individuals.

Customer Reviews

A Singular Book
A hugely entertaining and totally absorbing book which covers a further twelve of Sherlock Holmes' investigations originally published in The Strand magazine.

Holmes adventures are to me 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 "fourth smartest man in London" in the truly bizarre and at times comical, The Red-Headed League, Holmes is called upon to use his extraordinary powers of deduction and his ability to observe when others merely see, in a battle of wits against as varied and as determined a bunch of criminals as ever stepped outside the law.

The cases themselves are sometimes dangerous (The Speckled Band), sometimes cruel (A Case of Identity) but as often as not downright baffling - to you and me !

The famous quotes are all in there as well, such as the one beloved of Agent Mulder in The X Files from The Beryl Coronet when Holmes reveals "It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." or his expanation in The Red Headed League that "..the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling.." Or how about his musing to Watson at the start of A Case of Identity, "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent."

If you want to be diverted from the cares and worries of life, if you want to lose track of time, if you want to face the challenge of trying to help solve the unsolvable and be immersed into a book which, just a little, shows the flip-side of Victorian values, then The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is for you. Read and enjoy.

Mind puzzles and corruption in Victorian London
Sherlock Holmes stories often read like fiendishly difficult literary MENSA conundrums. Often it is almost impossible for the reader to guess how Holmes will solve his crime riddles and almost always the reader will kick himself/herself when the solution is revealed.
Perhaps the most annoying thing about Conan Doyle's writing is that he often does not reveal to the reader (or to Dr Watson who we see most of the action from) all the clues that Holmes uses to make his conclusions- and some are so utterly preposterous to be believed i.e. Holmes deducing a man is a labourer because the muscles in his right hand are more developed than in his left. This is very different from more modern crime authors such as Agatha Christie who tend to challenge the reader as much as the detective. Perhaps, then, reading Sherlock Holmes must demand some suspension of belief but this doesn't detract from the satisfaction of Holmes solving yet another seemingly impossible crime.
Good fun and also, at times, intellectually stretching. Conan Doyle exercises the reader's facilities to question events in real life whilst simultaneously creating one of the most enjoyable genres and popular characters in English fiction.

A must read
What can I write about this book that hasn't been said or written yet? Everybody knows everything about its plot and its characters, so I'll better write about what this book means to me.

I started reading when I was four. When I was a child, my family spent the summer in the country, and in few years I had read all the children's books that we had there. So,when I was seven I decided to explore my father's library: since I wasn't allowed to climb on a ladder (nor did I dare to), I took the first book I reached. Yes, it was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I won't pretend I understood everything I read there, but enough to make me want to read more. With the years I learned to love both Sherlock Holmes and its adventures. And I haven't stopped doing so.

Some may say SH is outdated, victorian, unreal and even a bore (oh, blasphemous rumours!). To me, it opened the doors of the "adult" literature and I will always be grateful for it. And besides, everytime I read a SH story, I enjoy it like the first time. How many books can claim to do so?