The Return of Sherlock Holmes

The Return of Sherlock Holmes collects thirteen stories that Arthur Conan Doyle published between 1903 and 1904 in The Strand Magazine in Britain and Collier's in the United States, and it appeared as a book in February 1905 in New York followed by a British edition the following month. The author had killed Holmes in 1893 and had spent a decade resisting requests to bring him back; the collection is the result of eventually relenting, and the stories were written to schedule rather than out of enthusiasm, which readers have argued about ever since.

The volume belongs to the middle period of the series and contains some of the most-admired cases, including the empty house, the Norwood builder, the dancing men and the six Napoleons. By this point the format is fixed and Doyle varies the technique instead of the structure: some of the stories involve a client who is lying, some are solved by a piece of social observation and at least one turns on Holmes reading a situation backwards from a small physical detail while Watson watches.

The collection followed The Hound of the Baskervilles, which had been a success while Holmes was still dead, and it led to further volumes including The Valley of Fear. Every television Holmes of the last thirty years has drawn on these stories, and the return itself, with its explanation for how the detective survived, is one of the best-known scenes in English crime fiction. The volume is also the point at which Watson's domestic life becomes part of the storytelling rather than a footnote.