The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects twelve cases narrated by Dr Watson from the detective’s Baker Street practice. The volume opens with A Scandal in Bohemia, in which Irene Adler defeats Holmes’s attempt to recover a compromising photograph, and continues through frauds, disappearances, inherited threats and domestic conspiracies. The Red-Headed League disguises a bank robbery as an absurd employment scheme, while The Five Orange Pips connects a sequence of deaths in England to the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan in the United States.

Other stories move between respectable households and the concealed violence beneath them: a stepfather obstructs a marriage in A Case of Identity, a doctor uses an exotic animal as a murder weapon in The Speckled Band, and a governess discovers coercion at the Copper Beeches. Across the collection Holmes relies on newspapers, tobacco ash, handwriting, footprints, disguise and knowledge of London’s social geography, while Watson records the tension between legal proof and the more flexible justice Holmes sometimes chooses.