The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Summary

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects the first twelve short stories about the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, each narrated by his friend Dr. John Watson. In A Scandal in Bohemia the King of Bohemia hires Holmes to recover a compromising photograph from the singer Irene Adler; Holmes, disguised first as a groom and then as a clergyman, tricks her into revealing its hiding place, but she sees through him and escapes with her new husband, leaving Holmes the admiring loser. The Red-Headed League sends a London pawnbroker, Jabez Wilson, to copy the encyclopaedia for a strange society of red-haired men while his assistant, the criminal John Clay, tunnels from his cellar toward a bank vault. In A Case of Identity a typist's vanished fiancé proves to be her own stepfather in disguise. The Boscombe Valley Mystery clears a young man of his father's murder and uncovers an old Australian gold-robbery and years of blackmail. The Five Orange Pips is a failure: a young client, warned by a secret society's sign, is murdered before Holmes can act. In The Man with the Twisted Lip Watson finds Holmes in an East End opium den, searching for a missing gentleman who turns out to have lived a double life as a scarred professional beggar. The Blue Carbuncle follows a stolen jewel into a Christmas goose, and Holmes lets the frightened thief go. In The Speckled Band a young woman fears the stepfather whose house killed her sister; Holmes and Watson keep watch in the dark bedroom, discover the ventilator, the dummy bell-rope, and a deadly Indian snake, and the doctor dies by his own weapon. A hydraulic engineer loses his thumb escaping from coiners in The Engineer's Thumb; an aristocrat's American bride vanishes from her wedding breakfast in The Noble Bachelor; a banker's son is wrongly accused of breaking a royal pledge in The Beryl Coronet; and in The Copper Beeches a governess is paid to cut her hair, wear an electric-blue dress, and sit with her back to the window, until she discovers that her employer's daughter is imprisoned upstairs. The stories appeared monthly in The Strand Magazine from July 1891 to June 1892, with Sidney Paget's illustrations, and were collected by George Newnes in October 1892. They set the pattern of the modern detective story: a client's narrative in the Baker Street sitting room, close observation of trifles, an expedition, and a final explanation of how the clues fit.

Top Lessons

• Seeing and observing

  In the first story Holmes tells Watson that he has climbed the stairs to their rooms hundreds of times without knowing there are seventeen steps. Across the collection Holmes reads a man's trade from his hands, a stranger's history from his hat, and a crime from a bell-rope that rings nothing. Attention is a discipline that can be practised.

• Facts first, then theories

  Holmes warns that a detective who theorizes too early begins to bend the facts to fit. In The Beryl Coronet everyone, including the boy's own father, decides Arthur Holder is guilty because he was found holding the coronet; Holmes reads the footprints in the snow and finds the truth was the opposite.

• Justice and mercy are not always the same as the law

  Holmes sometimes lets a guilty person go: the dying John Turner in Boscombe Valley, and James Ryder at Christmas in The Blue Carbuncle. He also admits failure in The Five Orange Pips and is beaten fairly by Irene Adler. The stories ask when mercy serves justice better than prosecution.

• Respectable masks

  Many villains in these stories wear respectable faces: a stepfather pretending to be a suitor, a doctor and landowner who is a murderer, a country gentleman who keeps his daughter prisoner, a baronet's son who is a thief. Doyle has Holmes say that the quiet countryside can hide as much sin as any London alley.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Written by a practising physician and narrated by a general practitioner, the Adventures are steeped in late Victorian medicine. Holmes's method openly imitates clinical diagnosis: the reading of a stranger's history from his hands, gait, or clothes descends from the bedside teaching of Doyle's Edinburgh teacher Joseph Bell. The collection is also an early fictional record of recreational drug use in a respectable class. Watson mentions Holmes's cocaine in the first paragraph of the first story, at a time when cocaine was a new and legal stimulant sold by chemists; The Man with the Twisted Lip opens with a careful picture of opium dependence, from a habit begun in imitation of De Quincey's Confessions to the yellow, pasty face and pin-point pupils of the user, and then descends into an East End opium den. The Speckled Band offers the physician-poisoner, and Holmes compares Roylott with the real poisoners William Palmer and Edward Pritchard, both medical men hanged for murder; the plot turns on a venom that Holmes says no chemical test could detect, a period anxiety about undetectable poisons. Watson treats a traumatic amputation of the thumb in The Engineer's Thumb, and the Copper Beeches turns on a young woman's six weeks of brain fever under pressure from her father, a common nineteenth-century diagnosis for illness brought on by emotional strain whose modern equivalent is uncertain. The dying John Turner's diabetes is mentioned as a death sentence, as it was before insulin. Readers should keep in mind that Holmes's habits are described, not prescribed, and that Watson himself disapproves of them in later stories.

• A Scandal in Bohemia, opening

  Watson describes Holmes, alone in Baker Street, alternating between bouts of cocaine and bursts of work on crime.

• The Man with the Twisted Lip, opening

  Isa Whitney's opium habit, begun after reading De Quincey, with the physical signs of the user; Watson then enters the Bar of Gold opium den in Upper Swandam Lane to bring him home and finds Holmes there in disguise.

• The Man with the Twisted Lip

  The beggar Hugh Boone's scarred, drawn-up lip, which proves to be greasepaint and disguise worn by Neville St. Clair to draw alms.

• The Adventure of the Speckled Band

  Dr. Grimesby Roylott, a physician who once practised in Calcutta, uses a trained swamp adder through a ventilator; Holmes reflects on doctors who become murderers and on poisons that escape chemical detection.

• The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb

  Victor Hatherley comes to Watson's surgery near Paddington with his thumb cut off by a cleaver; Watson cleans and dresses the wound while the patient tells his story.

• The Boscombe Valley Mystery

  John Turner, dying of long-standing diabetes, confesses to the killing and is spared the trial he would not live to finish.

• The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

  Mrs. Toller explains that Alice Rucastle, harried by her father to sign away her rights, fell ill with brain fever for six weeks and had her hair cut off.