The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Twelve short cases, first collected in 1892, in which a consulting detective reads boots, cuffs, cigar ash and the mud on a carriage wheel. Conan Doyle trained as a physician in Edinburgh and built Holmes's method out of the diagnostic habits of a clinician: observe first, theorise second, and be willing to be wrong.
The stories are economical. A client arrives, a small impossibility is stated, and the solution rearranges facts already on the page. That fairness is why the format survived every imitation of the last hundred years.
Public-domain status
First published in 1892. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, so this work has been free to republish there since 2001.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 1661 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
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- Edinburgh — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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