With a knock on the door, a stranger enters Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street rooms, begging Holmes to solve a ghastly and perplexing mystery. The legendary detective and his longtime friend Dr. Watson set out to explore the scene of the crime, making headway where the literally clueless police have failed. Combining an acute eye for the telling detail with an encyclopedic knowledge of the most esoteric subjects, Holmes follows the clues on a circuitous and perilous path until he solves the case in dramatic fashion. Back at Baker Street, he readily explains to Watson any point in the chain of reasoning that might have escaped the old boy’s understanding.

     From his first outing, the novel A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle found the winning formula on display in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I, which also includes another masterful Holmes novel, The Sign of Four. In addition, the incomparable sleuth resolves conundrums and captures villains in the twenty-three short stories contained in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, including “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Red-Headed League,” “The Speckled Band,” and “The Final Problem.”  

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859. Initially a medical doctor by profession, he published the first Sherlock Holmes novel at age twenty-seven.  In later years, the deaths of several family members, including of his beloved son Kingsley, led Conan Doyle to an abiding interest in spiritualism. He died in East Sussex, England, in 1930.