Grant's Reviews > The Greatest Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Great Edition! I just finished the first book, Study in Scarlet, which I had not read. Excellent mystery, with a great deal of information regarding Sherlock in the early going of the book, since this is or must be one of his first. The whole relationship with Dr. Watson started in this book, and he became the vehicle to move the stories along, as well as the keeper of the detailed records of the cases. I didn't know that he was in the service in Afghanistan, home in London on medical leave when he met Holmes. Also, the Introduction is fabulous, and I learned much I didn't know about ACD-his articles in The Strand, his frequent attempts to end the Holmes stories in search of the bigger novel, and that he was a doctor who wrote to fill the time between patients.
More later...
Just finished Valley of Fear. Told in two parts, with the present tense being the first, and the past setting the stage being told last. I had to go back and re-read the first to remember who it all came about. It was seamless, and brilliant, and in the end (beginning) all is explained, from the gold fields and coal mines of America to the secret society of the Scowrers in the valley of fear to the murder that takes place 11 years later in England. Bodymaster McGinter, McMurdo and Douglas all fall into their respective parts in the mystery of the mis-identified mutilated corpse found in a remote castle in England. And yet so much more to come...
Read these shorts: The Gloria Scott, The Stockbroker's Clerk, The Yellow Face, Silver Blaze,
and finally, I have read everything that I can find published by Arthur Conan Doyle. I obviously love Sherlock. Many of the stories book in this are not Sherlock Holmes' mysteries.