Sherlock Holmes: Complete Stories & Novels

I can't remember when I first read the Holmes stories and novels - but I loved them and re-read the stories from beginning (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes)  to end (The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes) every few years - before reading again, I waited until I couldn't really remember the endings, so I had to wait longer and longer in between reads.

Well, it had been quite awhile since I last read them, but my interest was piqued again when Jesse recommended the Sherlock TV episodes with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman.  The episode I watched with Jesse was A Study in Pink - fantastic! - loosely based on the novel A Study in Scarlet.  I thought I would read A Study in Scarlet to compare to the TV adaptation, and I realized that though I had re-read the stories several times, I had only read the novels once (except for Hound of the Baskervilles, which I love and have re-read several times).  So, the game was afoot, I was off and reading - the novels and then all the stories - (accelerated by having loaded them onto my phone and reading at all odd moments of inactivity)..

Well, the novels are pretty good reads, but (except for Hound) are basically a long backstory wrapped at each end: a short introduction that describes a case presented to Holmes and an ending that provides Holmes' solution.  Each of these is a good case and a good yarn, but generally not a full-length mystery (Hound is an exception - it's perfect!)  Of the other three, the Valley of Death was terrific: a compelling case and a completely absorbing and fascinating backstory.

This time, on reading the stories, I had some new favorites.  Some of the most famous (eg, A Scandal in Bohemia) no longer held quite the same fascination for me, though another famous one, Silver Blaze, still seemed magnificent (eg, "Is there any point to which you would like to draw my attention?"  "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."  "The dog did nothing in the night-time!" "That was the curious incident").    But this time around, some others really captured my interest