The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of 12 Sherlock Holmes tales, previously published in monthly installments in The Strand Magazine between July 1891 and June 1892, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and published in 1892.
“To Sherlock Holmes she is always ’the woman.’” So begins “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first story in the collection. Irene Adler is “the” woman because she is the only person ever to have outwitted Holmes. The King of Bohemia fears that he will be blackmailed by Adler, his former lover, who has kept some compromising love letters and a photograph. However, she manages to turn the tables on the detective, retaining the photograph to ensure her own safety. Holmes, Conan Doyle tells us by way of narrator Dr. John Watson, has no emotional attachment to Adler, but in countless film and television adaptations, such as the BBC series Sherlock (2010–2017), Adler is both a femme fatale and a decided love interest of the great detective’s. Other highlights in the collection are the eerie “The Red-Headed League,” where criminals offer a red-headed man employment copying entries from Encyclopaedia Britannica as a ruse to keep him occupied while they dig a tunnel from the cellar of his premises to a neighbouring bank. In “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Holmes’s help is enlisted to solve the mystery of the disappearance of Mr. Neville St. Clair. His wife has seen him at the window of an opium den in a rougher part of town, but the police are unable to find anyone but a beggar. A number of enigmas follow before Holmes is able to reach a conclusion.
The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes in 1887 (in A Study in Scarlet) is particularly interesting in historical terms. For the first time, European cities had proliferated to the point where it was impossible to know more than a small percentage of their inhabitants. Yet the London that features in these stories manages to resist the idea that the city is sublime, that it is too large for any one person to be able to comprehend. Holmes and Watson represent Conan Doyle’s bourgeois remedy to the terrifying and seemingly endless late 19th-century expansion of urban and industrial civilization.
Conan Doyle dedicated The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to Joseph Bell, with whom he had studied medicine, and who contributed much to the character of Holmes with his relentlessly logical pursuit of knowledge. (See also Sherlock Holmes: Pioneer in Forensic Science.) The book was an immediate success on its publication in Britain on October 14, 1892, published in an initial edition of 10,000 copies. An American edition was released immediately afterward, introducing readers in the United States to Holmes and a literary franchise that would come to include many more volumes of stories, as well as films and television series and innumerable works of homage and parody.