Rating: WORTHY!
Holmes suffers through some terrible winters and storms in this volume. Why Doyle wanted a good many of these stories to start out with bad weather is a mystery worth exploring, I feel! Maybe they just reflect the time of year he was writing them. The stories are listed below with brief comments.
- The Adventure of the Empty House
Set in 1894, three years after the supposed death of Sherlock Holmes, the detective returns and contacts Watson. He faked his death - of course - and was scurrying around for thre previous three years trying to lay his hands on Moroarty's confederates. This sotry invovles the trappign of the last of them with a completely unbeleivable dummy of Sherlock Holmes which invites the confederate to murder him using an air gun (that fires real bullets, not BBs or pellets), and thereby get himself captured. - The Adventure of the Norwood Builder
This invovles holmes's exoneration of John Hector McFarlane who was set up as a murderer. - The Adventure of the Dancing Men
This features the alphabet code of dancing men - each of which has a flag if it's the end of the sentence. Otherwise the code is ocmpeltely simple and unremarkable and does ntothignt o hdie the prevalnece of certain letters of the alphabet, such as the eltter 'E' which is coomon in English writing. It retreads an old story used in other Holmes adventures, of a betrothed woiman who has a previous assignation. - The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
This sounds like the title of a Monty Python skit, and it's almost as amusing as one, but not quite. It's a story about ruffians deceiving a woman to get at her inheritance. - The Adventure of the Priory School
This was a story that was used in the British Sherlock TV series, and features the apparent kidnapping of a schoolboy. - The Adventure of Black Peter
Black Peter the pirate! LOL! Really he's a whaler and dishonest to boot! - The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
Thgis sotry was also used in the British Sherlock TV series, but it pans out differently in the book than it did in the show. There's no mind palace here, just a blacklmailer. - The Adventure of the Six Napoleons
Again, used in the TV series where it became the Six Thatchers and was about spyies. In the book it was about missing jewelery. - The Adventure of the Three Students
The three students were all suspects in the theft of exam answers. No murders at all in this one! - The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez
The golden pince-nez were left a the scene of a murder and Holmes must track down the apparent female guilty party. The story starts out "It was a wild, tempestous night" which is almost as good as the trope 'dark and sotry evening"! - The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
The missing three-quarter was a rugby player who apparently let down his side! - The Adventure of the Abbey Grange
Sir Eustace Brackenstall has been killed! Holmes rousts poor Watson on minutes' notice to rush away on a train to solve the crime! Why Watson puts up with this treatment from Holmes is the real mystery. Holmes thinks nothing of sticking the doctor with the hotel bill. - The Adventure of the Second Stain
The Right Honourable Trelawney Hope, Secretary of State for European Affairs, is desperate for Holmes to find a misisng document before war breaks out! This is also the story in which we hear that Holmes has at last retired, forbidding watson to publish any more accounts of his doings. In an earlier story we'd learned that Holmes was dissatisfied with Watson's telling of these adventures, and was thinking fo writign his own treatise on the detective work he does.
I had never read these stories before, so they seemed fresh and it was an interesting experience to read them rather than go over something I'd read before. It's full of relatively mundane crimes rather than sensational ones, which for me made it more interesting, so I commend this as a worthy read.
