The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Summary
This first collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories gathers twelve cases narrated, as ever, by Dr. Watson from their shared rooms at 221B Baker Street, opening with A Scandal in Bohemia, in which Holmes is outmaneuvered by the one woman he ever fully respects, the singer and adventuress Irene Adler, and closing with The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, a case of domestic menace disguised as a governess job. Between them come The Red Headed League, in which an absurd job advertisement conceals a bank robbery in progress, and The Adventure of the Speckled Band, Doyle's own favorite among the twelve, a locked room murder whose solution turns on a trained snake and a cruel stepfather's greed. Each story follows the same reliable shape Doyle perfects across the collection, a client arrives with a puzzle that seems either trivial or impossible, Holmes reads a chain of physical detail from hat brims and mud splashes that Watson and the police both miss entirely, and the solution, once stated, looks obvious only in hindsight. Holmes's own character comes into fuller focus here than in the two earlier novels, his boredom between cases, his contempt for Scotland Yard's plodding, his genuine, if narrow, code of justice that sometimes lets a sympathetic wrongdoer walk free rather than face the law.
Doyle's real innovation across these twelve stories is structural as much as anything, the short story rather than the novel becoming the detective form's natural length, each case self contained enough to be read on its own and satisfying enough that readers came back to the Strand Magazine every month specifically for the next one. The prose is brisk and unshowy, built to keep the puzzle moving, and Watson's steady, slightly credulous narration gives Holmes's deductions room to land as genuine surprises rather than as a writer simply withholding information.
Irene Adler appears in only this single story out of the entire Holmes canon, yet has become one of its most prominent characters in modern adaptation, largely on the strength of being the one person who ever beats Holmes outright.
Historical Context & Significance
The Strand Magazine serialized the twelve stories from July 1891 to June 1892, paying Doyle thirty guineas apiece and watching its own circulation climb sharply as a result, and George Newnes published them as a single collection on 14 October 1892 with illustrations by Sidney Paget throughout, in a first printing of ten thousand UK copies and forty five hundred more for the American market. Contemporary papers were enthusiastic: the Hull Daily Mail judged A Scandal in Bohemia worthy of Doyle's inventive genius, and the Leeds Mercury praised how fully Holmes's own foibles came through, though the Cheltenham Looker-On called Holmes rather a bore sometimes and found the descriptions of his foibles growing wearisome.
The collection fixed the shape of detective short fiction for generations of writers afterward, and Doyle himself named four of these twelve among his dozen favorite Holmes stories in a 1927 list. It has been adapted continually since, through the Granada Television series of the 1980s and 1990s and beyond, and was banned outright in the Soviet Union in 1929 on suspicion of occultism, a ban not lifted until 1940.