The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES and THE MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and died in 1930. Into these years he crowded a variety of activity and creative work that earned him an international reputation and inspired the French to give him the epithet of ‘the good giant’. He was educated at Stonyhurst and later studied medicine at Edinburgh University, where he became the surgeon’s clerk to Professor Joseph Bell whose diagnostic methods provided the model for the science of deduction perfected by Sherlock Holmes.

He set up as a doctor at Southsea and it was while waiting for patients that he began to write. His growing success as an author enabled him to give up his practice and to turn his attention to other subjects. He was a passionate advocate of many causes, ranging from divorce law reform and a Channel Tunnel to the issuing of steel helmets to soldiers and inflatable life jackets to sailors. He also campaigned to prove the innocence of individuals, and was instrumental in the introduction of the Court of Criminal Appeal. He was a volunteer physician in the Boer War and later in life became a convert to spiritualism.

As well as his Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle wrote a number of other works, including historical romances, such as The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896) and Rodney Stone (1896). In the science fiction tale The Lost World (1912), he created another famous character, Professor Challenger, who appears in several later stories.

Sherlock Holmes first appeared in A Study in Scarlet in 1887. The Holmes stories soon attracted such a following that Conan Doyle felt the character overshadowed his other work. In ‘The Final Problem’ (1893) Conan Doyle killed him off, but was obliged by public demand to restore the detective to life. Despite his ambivalence towards Holmes, he remains the character for which Conan Doyle is best known.

IAIN PEARS is a novelist and historian. He has written six detective novels, as well as An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997) and numerous reviews and articles. He lives in Oxford.

ED GLINERT was born in Dalston, London, and read Classical Hebrew at Manchester University. He recently edited The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, and has also annotated the collections of Sherlock Holmes stories The Valley of Fear and Selected Cases, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four for Penguin Classics. He is the author of A Literary Guide to London (Penguin, 2000) and is currently working on a new guide to London for Penguin.

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Introduction by IAIN PEARS
Notes by ED GLINERT

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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes first published 1892;
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes first published 1894.
This collection published in Penguin Classics 2001
1

Introduction copyright © Iain Pears, 2001
Notes copyright © Ed Glinert, 2001
All rights reserved

The moral right of the editors of Introduction
and Notes has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 9781101488720

CONTENTS

Introduction

Further Reading

Chronology

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Silver Blaze

The Yellow Face

The Stockbroker’s Clerk

The Gloria Scott

The Musgrave Ritual

The Reigate Squires

The Crooked Man

The Resident Patient

The Greek Interpreter

The Naval Treaty

The Final Problem

Notes

INTRODUCTION

Sherlock Holmes was a success from the moment of his first appearance in 1887, and has never wavered in public esteem. Even though he had many predecessors, and has had many rivals then and since, he rapidly became the official prototype of the detective, and in particular of the English detective. This is peculiar in many ways, as the Holmes stories are largely atypical of the English detective genre as it evolved over the next half-century or so. Even the classic Holmesian form is at odds with what later became standard. Firstly, Holmes was written by a man while, in England at least, the genre rapidly became dominated by a whole series of women – Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and so on. Secondly, the presentation was entirely different; most of the Holmes adventures came via the short story of less than ten thousand words, while the classic English detective story was in short novels about five times as long. Finally, the typical Holmesian stamping ground – and what the stories are primarily remembered for – is what might be termed the mean streets of Victorian London, down in the docks, in the opium dens, or alternatively in the new suburbs, all far removed from the cosy world of the English village or the country house murder. So many are the differences, in fact, that it can be doubted whether Holmes can be called the starting point of the English detective story at all; many of the stories’ characteristics have much more in common with the American hard-boiled strand as it developed under Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett – both of whom also specialized in the short story for magazines.

So why was Holmes so successful and why, at the same time, was he not really emulated in his country of origin? Above all, there is the simple quality of the stories, and in particular of the short stories presented here. Like that of many another fictional character, Holmes’s success came despite his author; Conan Doyle always had something of a hard time accepting that he was going to be remembered for pieces of work which he considered less important than his more substantial efforts. Yet, the Holmes stories are a classic example of how quality sometimes varies in inverse relation to the amount of effort put in. Whereas many of Conan Doyle’s other works show the failings of late nineteenth-century writing – being frequently excessively wordy, overwrought and mannered – with Sherlock Holmes in the earlier stories he achieved an extraordinary economy, an almost impressionistic ability to communicate atmosphere and character with the slightest of brushstrokes. The classic example of this, perhaps, is quite literally the atmosphere. While the London fog is indelibly associated with the tales it is in fact scarcely ever mentioned; there are as many references to London sun as to fog. The weather, indeed, is only rarely referred to at all; the dark brooding quality of many of the tales instead creates an impression which in fact exists largely in the reader’s own imagination.

The requirements of the short story meant that the adventures were presented in a stripped-down form, with no redundant words. The forward momentum that results is remarkable, and everything hangs from the framework of the plot; this, more than anything else, has given them their enduring strength.