The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859-1930) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was published in 1892 as a collection of 12 short stories. The texts detail some of the earliest cases of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes as narrated by his friend and collaborator, Doctor John Watson. The stories appear in the order in which they were originally published in The Strand Magazine.

Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh to Catholic parents, the second of 10 children. The family’s situation was fraught due to his father’s alcoholism and eventual commitment to an asylum. With the help of wealthy relatives, however, Conan Doyle received an education at several schools in England and Austria, and later completed a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh. During his time at medical school, Conan Doyle began writing short stories. His earliest known text is the manuscript “The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe” from the late 1870s, while his first published story is “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley” (1879).

Sherlock Holmes appears in a total of 56 short stories and several novels. The detective was inspired by Conan Doyle’s university instructor Joseph Bell, considered one of the pioneers of forensic science. Bell was able to observe minute details about his patients and use them to deduce their condition.