3 Review(s)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twelve short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, featuring his most famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. The individual stories had been serialized in The Strand Magazine between June 1891 and July 1892, and the book was first published in October 1892. Homes and Dr. Watson are common to all twelve stories. The stories are told by first-person narrative from the point of view of Dr. Watson. In 1927, Doyle submitted a list of what he believed were his twelve best Sherlock Holmes stories to The Strand Magazine. Among those he listed were “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (as his most favourite), “The Red-Headed League” (second), “A Scandal in Bohemia” (fifth) and “The Five Orange Pips” (seventh). The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929 because of its alleged “occultism”, but the book gained popularity in a black market of similarly banned books, and the ban was lifted in 1940. The stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes identify and correct social injustices such as “a king’s betrayal of an opera singer; a stepfather’s deception of his ward as a fictitious lover; an aristocratic crook’s exploitation of a failing pawnbroker; and a beggar’s extensive estate in Kent.” Holmes possesses a keen sense of justice. The stories were so well received when they appeared in The Strand Magazine that they boosted the subscription of the magazine and prompted Doyle to demand more money for his next set of stories. The story, “A Scandal in Bohemia”, includes the character of Irene Adler, who despite being featured only within this one story by Doyle, is a prominent character in modern Sherlock Holmes.