Sherlock Holmes — The Complete Canon (eBook)

The complete Sherlock Holmes — all of it, in one volume, in the order Doyle published it.

Four novels and fifty-six short stories: 655,769 words of canon, from A Study in Scarlet (1887) to the last Case-Book story of 1927. The texts follow the early book editions and were verified the hard way — cross-checked against scans of those editions, with the famous traps tested on the page: the phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" occurs zero times in the canon (the word "Elementary" occurs once, in The Crooked Man), the word "deerstalker" never appears at all, and Watson's Jezail wound really does move from his shoulder to his leg between the first two novels. Every heading and the order of contents were taken from the texts themselves.

Inside: an introduction on the Strand phenomenon, the death at Reichenbach, and the return; a Who's Who of the canon's essential figures, from Holmes and Watson to Toby the tracking dog; five explainers (the science of deduction and real Victorian forensics; the Strand and Sidney Paget — how the pictures fixed the detective's image; Holmes's London; the chronology puzzle of the wandering wound and the marriages; Doyle against Holmes, the creator who tired of his detective); a short life of Arthur Conan Doyle; an honest note on reading the period text; an appendix canon table of all 60 works with their first-publication dates; and discussion questions for every novel and collection plus a whole-canon set — 53 questions in all.

The canon is public domain in the United States (every work published before 1931; the Holmes characters are public domain per Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, 7th Cir. 2014). All companion material is original to this edition. This is an independent edition, not affiliated with any estate. A printable Book Club Kit is available in this store.