Book fairies shared gold embossed cloth-bound hardbacks of the full Sherlock Holmes collection today around the UK!
Wordsworth Editions have released some more classics into their Collector’s Editions! The Book Fairies were lucky enough to share these in places of relevance to the books. Here is some info about the books – and where we left them!
The Hound of the Baskervilles & The Valley of Fear:
“Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”
The Hound of the Baskervilles is the classic detective chiller. It features the world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes, in his most challenging case. The Baskerville family is haunted by a phantom beast “with blazing eyes and dripping jaws” which roams the mist-enshrouded moors around the isolated Baskerville Hall on Dartmoor. Now the hound seems to be stalking young Sir Henry, the new master of the Baskerville estate. Is this devilish spectre the manifestation of the family curse? Or is Sir Henry the victim of a vile and scheming murderer? Only Sherlock Holmes can solve this devilish affair.
A Study in Scarlet & The Sign of the Four:
“There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it.”
‘Doctor Watson, Mr Sherlock Holmes’ – The most famous introduction in the history of crime fiction takes place in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, bringing together Sherlock Holmes, the master of science detection, and John H. Watson, the great detective’s faithful chronicler.
The Sign of the Four, the second Holmes novel, presents the detective with one of his greatest challenges. The theft of the Agna treasure in India forms a catalyst for treachery, deceit and murder.
The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes & His Last Bow:
‘“Let us try to reconstruct the situation,” said Holmes as we drove swiftly past the Houses of Parliament and over Westminster Bridge’
In The Casebook, you can read the final twelve stories that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about his brilliant detective. They are perhaps the most unusual and the darkest that he penned. Treachery, mutilation and the terrible consequences of infidelity are just some of the themes explored in these stories, along with atmospheric touches of the gothic, involving a bloodsucking vampire, crypts at midnight and strange bones in a furnace. The collection His Last Bow features some of Sherlock Holmes’ most dramatic cases, including the vicious revenge intrigue connected with ‘The Red Circle’ and the insidious murders in ‘The Devil’s Foot’.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes:
“A woman answering to Mme Fournaye’s description attracted much attention at Charing Cross station…”
Evil masterminds beware! Sherlock Holmes is back! Ten years after his supposed death in the swirling torrent of the Reichenbach Falls locked in the arms of his arch enemy Professor Moriarty, Arthur Conan Doyle agreed to pen further adventures featuring his brilliant detective. In the first story, ‘The Empty House’, Holmes returns to Baker Street and his good friend Watson, explaining how he escaped from his watery grave. In creating this collection of tales, Doyle had lost none of cunning or panache, providing Holmes with a sparkling set of mysteries to solve and a challenging set of mysteries to solve and a challenging set of adversaries to defeat. The potent mixture includes murder, abduction, baffling cryptograms and robbery. We are also introduced to the one of the cruellest villains in the Holmes canon, the despicable Charles Augustus Milverton. As before, Watson is the superb narrator and the magic remains unchanged and undimmed.
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes:
“As I passed the corner from Bentinck Street on to the Welbeck Street crossing a two-horse van furiously driven whizzed round and was on me like a flash..”
By the time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had completed the twelve stories for The Strand magazine that are gathered together in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, he was already growing tired of his most famous creation, but the financial incentive to continue was too great.
So began the second series of stories, known as The Memoirs; these introduced such notable characters as Holmes’ indolent brother, Mycroft, and Holmes’ most dangerous adversary, Professor James Moriarty, the ‘Napoleon of Crime’. The collection included such stories as ‘The Adventure of the Resident Patient’ and ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’, which Doyle would list later as amongst his favourites.
It was to Moriarty that was delegated the task of ending the career of the world’s finest consulting detective in a final, fatal encounter at The Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland in the concluding tale, ‘The Final Problem’.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:
“Have you dragged the basin of Trafalgar Square fountain?”
Having firmly established the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in the novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was retained by The Strand Magazine to contribute a series of twelve short stories, which began with ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ in 1891 and were published monthly for the next year.
The stories, in which the master sleuth receives a stream of clients presenting him with baffling and bizarre mysteries in his consulting room at 221B Baker Street, were instantly popular and by the time of the publication of the final story, ‘The Copper Beeches’, they had become the mainstay of the magazine.
They included such classic tales as ‘The Five Orange Pips’ and ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, and were gathered together in a collection known as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, representing some of the finest detective stories ever written.
Lucky finders of the books!
We love hearing from people who find our books! Here are a few of the messages we received from finders of the Sherlock collector editions 🙂
Not lucky enough to find a book today?
Do not worry at all! These beautiful editions are now available in all good book shops! If you cannot make it to your local, you can also find ways to buy them through the Wordsworth Editions website: