The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Wordsworth Collector's Editions) - Hardcover

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1840228318 ISBN 13: 9781840228311

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2021

Synopsis

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Having firmly established the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in the novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was retained by The Strand Magazine to contribute a series of twelve short stories, which began with A Scandal in Bohemia in 1891 and were published monthly for the next year. The stories, in which the master sleuth receives a stream of clients presenting him with baffling and bizarre mysteries in his consulting room at 221B Baker Street, were instantly popular and by the time of the publication of the final story, The Copper Beeches, they had become the mainstay of the magazine. They included such classic tales as The Five Orange Pips and The Adventure of the Speckled Band, and were gathered together in a collection known as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, representing some of the finest detective stories ever written.

About this title

About the Author

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859, the son of Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary (Foley) Doyle, both practising Roman Catholics. In order to supplement his income (he was an unsuccessful architect) his father painted and made illustrated books. Doyle attended the Jesuit Stonyhurst College but had abandoned his family’s Catholicism by the time he had completed his medical studies at Edinburgh University. In 1884 he married Louise Hawkins and qualified as a doctor in 1885 after which he practised as an eye specialist near Portsmouth until 1891, when he became a full-time writer. His father died in an asylum in 1893 after being institutionalized for some years. The first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was written in 1886 over a three week period and published a year later. This was followed by a second novel, The Sign of the Four (1890), and the first collection of short stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), all of which were first published in the Strand Magazine. Despite the huge popularity of the Holmes stories, Doyle felt they detracted from his other, more serious writing, so in the last story of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894) ‘The Final Problem’, Doyle killed off Holmes in a final, fatal confrontation with the arch-villain, Professor Moriarty. There was a huge public reaction, with 20,000 subscriptions to the Strand magazine cancelled, but Doyle resisted the pressure to bring back his finest creation until 1902, when he released The Hound of the Baskervilles, a full-length novel set earlier in Holmes’ career. Finally, in ‘The Empty Room’, the first story in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, he restored Holmes to life. Further stories appeared sporadically. The Valley of Fear, a novel in 1915, and two further collections of stories, His Last Bow (1917) and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1927).

Edition details

• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1840228318
• ISBN 13: 9781840228311
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304