The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – a review

Sherlock. A name synonymous with wit, mystery and a damn good story. Many of us have read these books and I am no exception! I’ve read a good many of the tales within this bind-up before, but not all of them and never together. My lovely mum brought this home for me when she worked in WHSmiths (a bookshop/stationary shop here in the UK) and given that she left that job back in 2014/15 this really took me far too long to read.

Do I really need to explain Sherlock Holmes to you? Probably not, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle captured the mystery tale with perfection and ease. He didn’t even like writing these books! He found them boring and simple! But they’ve captured the world for over a century after he first wrote the stories and sadly for him they live on forever linked to his name.

With twelve stories in this collection, and the book being A4 sized (a bit bigger than US standard letter paper I believe) this was a surprisingly quick read. As always I speed through Conan Doyle’s writing and find it difficult to put the book down. I love how Watson is utilised in different ways throughout the books, and now that I’ve experienced more adaptations than I had the last time I read these books, I love how the different stories bring to mind different iterations of each character. The BBC Sherlock, CBS’s Elementary, the House of Silk book that Anthony Horowitz published. All of them and more have done great adaptations of these works and I loved seeing the various influences that they pulled for their representations.

If you haven’t ever read a Sherlock book, and if you like a good mystery, I really do recommend picking these up. There are copies everywhere and you’re likely to find one in a secondhand shop with relative ease! It’s definitely worth a shot, as these stories have captured reasons for over a century (despite the authors best efforts!) for a reason.