In this collection of Holmes's stories, the beloved detective uses his uncanny skills to apply himself to various problems - rescue a king from blackmail, to capture an ingenious bank robber, and to save an innocent son accused of patricide.
This classic selection brings together twelve of the original stories serialized in the Strand Magazine in the early 1890s. Thrilling adventures such as ''A Scandal in Bohemia'' catapulted the keen-witted Holmes to fame and continue to make him the most beloved sleuth of all time.
Sherlock is unbelievable in the way that he solves his cases.
Makes me wonder about what happened during this century to the plot IN SHORT STORIES? - I believe most of these stories are unmatched!
The stories in this volume are:
A Scandal in Bohemia
The Red-headed League
A Case of Identity
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
The Five Orange Pips
The Man with the Twisted Lip
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes, wrote for us a total of 60 short stories and 4 novels featuring Sherlock Holmes. These are referred to as THE CANON. This volume book has twelve of them as a single volume.
Sherlock Holmes, the detective created by the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was born on 6th January 1854. That can be ''deduced'' from this volume! As for women, Holmes could never get over one in particular: Irene Adler. She would always be “the woman” to him and appears in this collection in the story ''A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA''.
The fact that some people choose to believe (or play at believing) that Holmes is real and Conan Doyle ''acted as Watson's agent for publication of Watson's memoirs'' is interesting and speaks for a longing unfulfilled by today's mass market smart-alec writers - the reason why these volumes are priceless!
Here is a collection of quotes from Sherlock Holmes that reveals the man and his methods for the uninitiated:
SOME OF MY FAVORITE QUOTES BY SHERLOCK HOLMES
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.
You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.
I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.
I have no time for trifles.
It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.
One should always look for a possible alternative and provide against it. It is the first rule of criminal investigation.
Here is my lens. You know my methods.
Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more and featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.
Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
There is no part of the body which varies so much as the human ear.
There is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details. My first glance is always at a woman's sleeve. In a man, it is perhaps better to take the knee of the trouser.
Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell.
What do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction!
Always look at the hands first, Watson. Then cuffs, trouser-knees, and boots.
It would be difficult to name any articles which afford a finer field for inference than a pair of glasses, especially so remarkable a pair as these.
There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.
The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.
Circumstantial evidence is occassionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example.
The more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a common place face is the most difficult to identify.
It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize out of a number of facts which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated.
You may not be aware that the deduction of a man's age from his writing is one which has been brought to considerable accuracy by experts. In normal cases one can place a man in his true decade with tolerable confidence.
It is true that though in your mission you have missed everything of importance, yet even those things which have obtruded themselves upon your notice give rise to serious thought.
You see, but you do not observe.
Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner.
I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule.
I never guess. It is a shocking habit -- destructive to the logical faculty.
Inspector Gregory, to whom the case has been committed, is an extremely competent officer. Were he but gifted with imagination he might rise to great heights in his profession.
One true inference invariably suggests others.
By a man's finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuff - By each of these things a man's calling is plainly revealed. That all united should fail to enlighten the competent inquirer in any case is almost inconceivable.
There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can't unravel the thousand and first.
It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious, because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn.
When a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.
There is nothing like first-hand evidence.
In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.
There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps.
We must look for consistency. Where there is want of it we must suspect deception.
There are no better instruments than discharged servants with a grievance, and I was lucky enough to find one
