The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

A Scandal in Bohemia

A Case of Identity

The Red-Headed League

The Boscombe Valley Mystery

The Five Orange Pips

The Man with the Twisted Lip

The Blue Carbuncle

The Speckled Band

The Engineer’s Thumb

The Noble Bachelor

The Beryl Coronet

The Copper Beeches

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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and died in 1930. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University and later set up practice as a doctor at Southsea. It was while waiting for patients to arrive that he began to write, and the success of his Sherlock Holmes’ stories are what Conan Doyle will always be remembered for.

Sherlock Holmes is the world’s most famous consulting detective working out of an office on Baker Street in London. The police make extensive use of his talents and criminals tremble with fear or fury at mere mention of his name, but it is to the most bizarre or thoroughly inexplicable of mysteries that Sherlock Holmes—together with his dogged companion and amanuensis Dr Watson—is most often drawn.

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Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in Great Britain by George Newnes Ltd 1892
First published in the United States of America by Harper & Bros 1892
Published in Penguin Books (UK) 1981
This edition published in Penguin Books (USA) 2009

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859-1930.
The adventures of Sherlock Holmes / Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-14499-2

1. Holmes, Sherlock (Fictitious character)—Fiction.
2. Private investigators—England—Fiction.
3. Detective and mystery stories, English. I. Title.
PR4622.A7 2009b
823’.8—dc22 2009028037

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To
my old Teacher
JOSEPH BELL MD etc.
of
2 Melville Crescent Edinburgh

A Scandal in Bohemia

1

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen: but, as a lover, he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.

I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention; while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.