The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes had already appeared twice without making his author’s name: in A Study in Scarlet, printed in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887, and in The Sign of the Four, commissioned over a London dinner and published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in February 1890. What changed was a magazine. George Newnes had founded the Strand in 1891, an illustrated monthly for the railway reader, and in July of that year it carried “A Scandal in Bohemia”. Arthur Conan Doyle was thirty-two, a doctor who had taken consulting rooms in London as an eye specialist and was waiting for patients who did not come. He had worked out the formula himself: a serial punishes a reader who misses a number, whereas a series of complete stories about one recurring character holds him without imprisoning him. Twelve ran monthly, illustrated by Sidney Paget, from July 1891 to June 1892, and Newnes collected them in October 1892 as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. By November 1891, five stories in, Doyle was already telling his mother that he meant to kill Holmes off.

The twelve are variations on a frame exact enough to describe in a sentence: a client climbs the stairs at Baker Street, tells a story that does not make sense, Holmes sees what is missing, and Watson — a doctor, a soldier and the reader’s representative — writes it up afterwards. What keeps the frame from becoming a cage is how often Doyle breaks it. Holmes is beaten in the first story, by Irene Adler; in the fifth, “The Five Orange Pips”, the client is dead before he can act; several of the twelve turn out to contain no crime at all; and more than once Holmes decides on his own authority to let a guilty man go. The deductive display that everyone remembers takes up a small share of the page count. The rest is atmosphere — fog, gaslight, hansom cabs, railway timetables, the last train down from Waterloo — and it was the atmosphere, not the method, that made the imitation industry possible.

Doyle thought “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” his own best; when the Strand asked him in 1927 to rank the stories, he put it first. Read them in the printed order rather than at random. The sequence was arranged for a monthly reader and alternates the domestic against the grotesque with more care than a book of magazine reprints usually receives.

This edition gives all twelve complete, in the order of the first collected edition, following the Gutenberg transcription. Paget’s illustrations are not reproduced; the text is Doyle’s, with the Victorian spellings and the sums in pounds and shillings left as he printed them.