“The Five Orange Pips” is the rare case in which Holmes fails to save the life of his client, who comes to him with a creepy story about three successive members of his family receiving a cryptic message before they died. In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” Holmes helps Inspector Lestrade prove the innocence of a young man who has been arrested for the murder of his father. In “A Case of Identity,” Holmes is hired by a near-sighted spinster to solve the disappearance of her fiancé. ![]() It turns out that the harmless scam of which he is the victim is only part of a plot to play much dirtier trick. “The Red-Headed League” is a comic tale about a stingy pawnbroker who suspects he has been had. In the Holmes canon, this is actually the only appearance of “ the woman,” as Holmes describes her: Irene Adler, celebrated as the only woman who ever outwitted him. It seems His Majesty has been foolish enough to allow another woman to possess a photograph of the two of them. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the King of Bohemia (which Conan Doyle seems to confuse with Scandinavia) hires Holmes to help him neutralize a threat to his marriage plans. But they are Holmes all over, the Sherlock you sure love, fascinating us (even when his cases don’t) by his keen observation, quick deduction, and encyclopedic recall of the history of crime-so that he can often solve in moments a case that keeps Scotland Yard guessing for days. Few of them are concerned with actual murder or even actionable crimes, and Holmes doesn’t always get his man (or woman). ![]() And though there are two novels and three volumes of short stories still to come, these 12 mysteries include some of Holmes’s most memorable and celebrated cases. Sherlock Holmes had already appeared in two novels, but his popularity did not really take off until the brief “adventures” collected in this book began to appear in monthly issues of The Strand Magazine, from 1891 to 1892.
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