Sherlock: The Essential Arthur Conan Doyle Adventures by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
| Sherlock: The Essential Arthur Conan Doyle Adventures by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | |
|
| |
| Category: Crime (Historical) | |
| |
Reviewer: Sue Magee
 | |
| Summary: A gift edition of the collected stories selected by Sherlock co-creators Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss. A suitable gift for an enthusiast. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 560 | Date: November 2015 |
| Publisher: BBC Books | |
| ISBN: 978-1785940163 | |
|
Share on: | |
|
| |
There can be few people who haven't heard of Sherlock Holmes, whether in the guise of the original stories or subsequent film and television adaptations including the most recent series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, who are pictured on the dust cover of Sherlock: The Essential Arthur Conan Doyle Adventures. It's this most recent series which has widened the fan base of the stories and many of them won't have copies of the original stories to hand. My own copy is a 1959 reprint of the 1929 edition which had four stories in one volume, but this current volume has nineteen stories in the one book.
Each story has been chosen by the Sherlock series co-creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat and they provide an introduction to each story. These are not extensive - for instance A Study in Scarlet is prefaced by The first adventure and still one of the best. Our heroes meet. 'You must have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.' Corpse thrashing! Mormons! Revenge! It must have landed like a rocket into Victorian fiction. It's short, to the point and doesn't intrude on what we're here for - which is the stories themselves.
The stories selected by Gatiss and Moffat are:
A Study in Scarlet
The Sign of Four
A Scandal in Bohemia
The Red-Headed League
A Case of Identity
The Man With The Twisted Lip
The Blue Carbuncle
The Speckled Band
The above eight stories are available in paperback in Sherlock: The Essential Arthur Conan Doyle Adventures Volume One
Silver Blaze
The Yellow Face
The Musgrave Ritual
The Greek Interpreter
The Final Problem
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The Empty House
Charles Augustus Milverton
The Bruce-Partington Plans
The Devil's Foot
The Dying Detective
I'm not going to comment on the individual stories: these are classics which you will love (or not) and anything I say is unlikely to persuade you either way. Unusually my star rating is for the book rather than the content. Getting all nineteen stories into one book without it looking unwieldy or having such small print that you need to borrow Holmes' magnifying glass is no mean feat and both are achieved admirably. The Oxford Paperbacks edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes contains just a dozen stories. This is the sort of book where you automatically look to see where the silk bookmark it - but I'm being very picky in thinking that it would have been a pleasant addition.
If you're looking for a gift for a Sherlock enthusiast this book could well be the answer and I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.
If you're looking for something not quite so well known from Conan Doyle we can recommend The Complete Brigadier Gerard Stories.
Please share on: 
Facebook, 
Twitter and
Instagram
You can read more book reviews or buy Sherlock: The Essential Arthur Conan Doyle Adventures by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Sherlock: The Essential Arthur Conan Doyle Adventures by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at Amazon.com.
Comments
Like to comment on this review?
Just send us an email and we'll put the best up on the site.
