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FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Complete Sherlock Holmes comprises four novels and fifty-six short stories revolving around the world’s most popular and influential fictional detective—the eccentric, arrogant, and ingenious Sherlock Holmes. He and his trusted friend, Dr. Watson, step from Holmes’s comfortable quarters at 221b Baker Street into the swirling fog of Victorian London to exercise that unique combination of detailed observation, vast knowledge, and brilliant deduction. Inevitably, Holmes rescues the innocent, confounds the guilty, and solves the most perplexing puzzles known to literature. Volume I of The Complete Sherlock Holmes starts with Holmes’s first appearance, A Study in Scarlet, a chilling murder novel complete with bloodstained walls and cryptic clues, followed by the baffling The Sign of Four, which introduces Holmes’s cocaine problem and Watson’s future wife. The story collections The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes feature such renowned tales as “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Red-Headed League,” and “The Musgrave Ritual.” Tired of writing stories about Holmes, his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, killed him off at the end of “The Final Problem,” the last tale in The Memoirs. But the public outcry was so great that eight years later he published the masterful The Hound of the Baskervilles, which supposedly takes place before Holmes’s death. The separate Volume II of The Complete Sherlock Holmes collects the remaining accounts of Holmes’s exploits, including “The Adventure of the Empty House,” which reveals the elaborate circumstances behind Holmes’s literary resurrection. Introduction and Notes by Kyle Freeman “Just what is it about Sherlock Holmes that has captivated people for so long? It’s easy to see some of the reasons for his popularity. His intelligence, his self-assurance, his mastery of every situation, and his unerring judgment are all enormously appealing. We are also attracted by Holmes’s sense of humor. From the very first Holmes not only sprinkles the stories with his dry retorts and ironic asides, he also laughs, chuckles, smiles, and jokes throughout. This quality goes a long way toward humanizing him, making it easier to feel affection for a character whose abilities could well make him seem more machine than human.” —from the Introduction by Kyle Freeman A Sherlock Holmes enthusiast for many years, Kyle Freeman earned two graduate degrees in English literature from Columbia University, where his major was twentieth-century British literature. He has seen just about all the Holmes movies of the last sixty years, as well as the television series with Jeremy Brett. Now working as a computer consultant, he constantly puts into practice Sherlock Holmes’s famous statement—“Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887, and the popularity of the famed sleuth singularly determined the author’s enduring legacy. But in addition to his mysteries, nonfiction, and historical works, Doyle enjoyed many adventures of his own. In 1900 he traveled to South Africa as a war-time physician in Cape Town; his treatise on the Boer War earned him a knighthood in 1902. During World War I, Conan Doyle served as a war correspondent. And from 1920 until his death in 1930, the author wrote, traveled, and lectured to promote his belief in spiritualism.

FROM THE CRITICS

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