The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories (Folio Society Edition)

DOYLE, Sir Arthur Conan (intro. Peter Cushing; illus. Francis Mosley). The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. London: The Folio Society, 2004. 5 vols.

8vo. All five volumes uniformly bound in illustrated red cloth, lettered in gold. Colour illustrations throughout by Francis Mosley. Comprising: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes; The Return of Sherlock Holmes; His Last Bow; The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. 1,354 pp. in total. Housed together in matching gilt-lettered slipcase. Fourth Folio printing with a new binding.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) trained as a physician before turning to fiction, and it was in the diagnostic method of one of his medical school professors, Dr Joseph Bell — whose gift for deducing a patient's occupation and history from the smallest physical details left a permanent impression on the young Doyle — that the character of Sherlock Holmes had its origin. Between 1887 and 1927, Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring the detective and his companion Dr Watson, and it is the short stories, collected here in their entirety across five volumes, that most decisively established Holmes as one of the most enduring and widely recognised characters in the whole of English literature.

The five collections trace both Holmes's career and Doyle's own complicated relationship with his most famous creation. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894) established the essential Holmes formula in the pages of The Strand Magazine, cementing the detective's reputation for brilliant, unorthodox deduction. Doyle, increasingly resentful of the character's overwhelming popularity relative to what he considered his more serious literary work, killed Holmes off in "The Final Problem," the concluding story of the Memoirs, sending him over the Reichenbach Falls locked in combat with his nemesis Professor Moriarty. Public outcry was immediate and sustained — famously prompting distraught readers in London to wear black armbands in mourning — and Doyle eventually relented, resurrecting Holmes in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905) with an explanation of his survival that has become as celebrated as any of the original mysteries. His Last Bow (1917) and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927) complete the sequence, carrying Holmes's career through to the eve of the First World War and beyond.

The introduction to this Folio Society edition is contributed by Peter Cushing (1913–1994), the British actor whose own portrayal of Holmes — on screen in Hammer Films' 1959 adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles and subsequently across a celebrated BBC television series — made him, for a generation of viewers, the definitive screen embodiment of the character, giving his introduction a particular authority and warmth. The illustrations throughout by Francis Mosley bring a consistent visual atmosphere to the full sweep of Holmes's fifty-six adventures, from the gaslit fog of Baker Street to the furthest reaches of the cases that took Holmes and Watson across England and occasionally beyond it.

Near fine in good slipcase. Slipcase shows some shelf markings and some markings internally. Volumes have some faint spotting along edges, otherwise clean and bright throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000580