Sherlock Holmes : The Complete Novels and Stories (Bantam Classic) Volume… (edition 1986)

Sherlock never once says "Elementary, my dear Watson." ( )

Curious and rather wonderful aspect with Sherlock Holmes' stories is the total lack of artificial suspence - there is no need to frantically flick through the pages in order to get from one action to another, everything is rolled out nice and smoothly...

PS! Should anyone read the adventures for the very first time and has an edition with introduction by Loren Estleman, I strongly recommend to enjoy this part AFTER finishing the book or you miss a lot of insight :) ( )

Sherlock is lost on the plane! The culprits are identified (and harangued) but can our intrepid lost baggage service locate the missing collection!?!?! Watch this space.

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A very enjoyable romp through a bygone London. Lots of lovely ideas to plagiarise if I had any inkling (or aspiration) to be a crime writer. Really, Conan Doyle should be included in creative writers' courses.

Sherlock Holmes is a character which long ago reached pop culture status. The books, novels, and short stories are so well-known, and have been gone over so many times, that very little can really be said which hasn't been said already. In effect, what I say is pretty much *guaranteed* to have been said before. The attempt to write something original on the topic is like that of a student trying to write an original Honor's Thesis. It's simply really not feasible.

The short stories and novels that make up *The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume One* are the earliest stories about the “consulting detective”. These earlier entries are considered the best stories by most fans of the character. It is commonly thought that the stories after Holmes' dramatic return from supposed “death” are of a lower quality than those beforehand. From what I have seen, though, I must disagree. The stories are, indeed, different, but not of lower quality. They are more outlandish, and Holmes' actions more comic or at times morally questionable, but they are not of a worse quality in terms of literature or prose. This difference, though, makes sense if one interprets it as Doyle's attempt to make the character more enjoyable for him to write. Doyle did *not* want to bring back Holmes, but eventually gave into the financial incentives and public outcry, as he really had a difficult time trying to publish the non-fiction that he *wanted* to write.

All of the above is common knowledge, so I will simply share my observations from the stories in this fairly large volume.

1. Watson is NOT a blithering, bumbling moron, as he so often has been erroneously portrayed to be. He is an intelligent, physically powerful (though slightly infirm, or partially disabled as we might say today, from an old war wound) man. He is *highly* intelligent. Indeed, he is arguably almost as intelligent as Holmes, but has merely never taken the time to learn the craft that Holmes did. Once he did take the time, he was almost as quick on the uptake as Holmes himself was. He also was a man who, due to tragedy, was married twice. He had an active social life, and was not just Holmes' brainless partner. His only drawback (if you want to call it this) was his shyness.

2. Professor Moriarty is NOT Holmes” arch-enemy. That is something added on by later portrayals, due in large part to the creation of the character and his criminal organization in the story chronicling what Doyle originally had intended to be Holmes' death. For all of it's merits as a modern reinterpretation, the BBC series, *Sherlock*, unfortunately adds to this.

3. Irene Adler is NOT smarter than Holmes. Even though the new Robert Downey, Jr., film makes this appear to be the case, there is very little in the canon to justify this perception. Though Holmes viewed her as “beating him”, her “victory” was figuring out who he was AFTER he had trapped her, and escaping said trap.

About the above, for all of it's faults, the eponymous 2009 movie had at least the benefit of having a more true to the stories portrayal of Watson. That is one thing that I really like of the film. Tis a true pity that more theatrical and stage interpretations of Holmes do not follow the original source material in this way.

I would say that the greatest contribution the books have made is their virtual invention of modern forensic science. Though these methods were known in Doyle's time, they were not widely used. As a discipline, Doyle pretty much inaugurated this branch of investigation and science.

The stories span the time frame of a couple of decades. Though we don't always get a consistent picture of the characters, we get enough. The books even follow the real-time development of police work. At the start, Holmes likes, but still has a certain amount of contempt for, the law enforcement officials, particularly those at Scotland Yard. As the stories go on, Holmes gains increasing respect for the Law Enforcement which he encounters. This dovetails with the real-life improvements in the ability of the police of Doyle's time.

The only real critique I can have of the writing is the earlier-referenced morally questionable choices of Holmes (and Watson too, for that matter). Some of their choices in two of the stories near the end of this first volume, really put me off. They really were skirting the territory between hero and villain. I can't give this first volume of Holmes' complete adventures an unqualified referral due to this, but I *can* Highly Recommend it, nonetheless. ( )

After watching (and loving) the last Sherlock Holmes movie, and the BBC TV show Sherlock, I just knew I had to read the novels and stories. I have had these books for years, so I finally started. This volume contains the novels A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and the story collections Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and The Return of Sherlock Holmes. There is not much new I can say about these stories that hasn’t already been said before.
I really liked these stories, and the writing. I love Sherlock for his anti-social behavior, his character, his way of doing things. The cases described here (except for the novels) are pretty short and sweet, making them nice quick reads. Because the stories are so short it matters a lot less that there is a lot of repetition in the stories. A lot of hidden identities, murky histories in far away lands, and generally a lot of story-lines that are very familiar to me, a reader a 100 years after the stories have been published. But if you read them keeping in mind when they have been written, what people read then, they are great stories, and still very enjoyable. ( )