Book description
The hit BBC series Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch,
offers a fresh, contemporary take on the classic Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle stories, and has helped introduce a whole new generation of fans
to the legendary detective. In this new edition of Conan Doyle's first
collection of short stories, Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss
explains how these gripping tales inspired and influenced the new series.
Sherlock: The Adventures contains twelve short stories first
published in The Strand magazine between 1891 and 1892 and then
published as a collection in October 1892. It includes some of Conan
Doyle's best tales of murder and mystery, such as 'The Adventures of
the Speckled Band', in which the strange last words of a dying woman
'It was the band, the speckled band!' and an inexplicable whistling in
the night are the only clues Sherlock Holmes has to prevent another
murder; and 'The Five Orange Pips', in which an untimely death and the
discovery of the letter containing five orange pips lead to a
cross-Atlantic conspiracy.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859. He trained
as a doctor at Edinburgh University and it was during this time that
he witnessed methods of diagnosis that would later inspire Sherlock
Holmes' astonishing methods of deduction. A Study in Scarlet
was Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novel, published in 1887, but
it was The Sign of Four, published in 1890, that catapulted him
to worldwide fame.
From 1891 he wrote short stories about the immortal detective for
The Strand magazine. He attempted to kill off Sherlock Holmes
in 1893, in The Final Problem, but was forced to revive him
after thousands of complaints. Conan Doyle died in 1930 having written
two more Sherlock Holmes novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles
and The Valley of Fear, both serialized in The Strand,
and a total of 56 short stories. Not only the master of popular crime
fiction, he also wrote the best-selling science fiction novel, The
Lost World from the Professor Challenger series.
