The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects twelve stories that Arthur Conan Doyle published in The Strand Magazine between July 1891 and June 1892, and it appeared as a book on 14 October 1892. The stories were written after two Holmes novels had already been published, and they were the first short fiction to feature the character. Their success is why Conan Doyle found himself writing about Holmes for the rest of his life, a relationship he complained about and exploited in equal measure.

The cases in the collection are short and self-contained. "A Scandal in Bohemia" introduces Irene Adler and the idea that Holmes can be out-thought; "The Red-Headed League" builds a bank robbery out of a preposterous advertisement; "A Case of Identity" is domestic cruelty rather than grand crime; "The Speckled Band" involves a locked room and a family history. Watson is the narrator throughout, and the format is fixed here: a client arrives, Holmes looks at the details and reasons backwards to the crime, and the solution is explained in a conversation at the end.

The book sold well on publication and has never been out of print, and it was the collection that made Holmes a public figure rather than a character in a couple of novels. Every adaptation of the stories, from the radio plays to the television series, works from this volume and the one that followed it.