short stories

This Sherlock Holmes collection remains an enduring classic that for those who love this take on Victorian England can be read and reread with great pleasure. A good part of that pleasure is the language and the mystique of the time and place, but most of the pleasure, I suspect, comes from the way Holmes's mind works. It is especially fun to view that mind through the stuffy fog of Watson's narration. No matter how hard he tries to figure out what is going on, Holmes is always several steps ahead of him - and the reader as well.

The most fascinating aspect of these stories is the strangely modern character that Conan Doyle created in Holmes, a mystery man with an ill defined past, who plays the violin, possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of odd minutia that only the FBI labs could fully appreciate, thinks blindingly fast and always outside the box, is addicted to drugs and strangely indifferent to sex (as far as Watson knows, anyway). A far cry from what we have come to expect a detective to be, but SO entertaining in these very artificial melodramas. These stories are so far from what any kind of police or detective work have ever been that one could dismiss them, except then we would miss the fun.

Sherlock Holmes, the great consulting detective, hardly needs an introduction, nor do his stories need a synopsis. This hardcover edition of "The Complete Sherlock Holmes" contains all the original Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels published by Conan Doyle.

As such, this book is the perfect compilation of a timeless classic, for both those re-reading these wonderful stories or those discovering them for the first time. In addition to this, I loved the cover art of this particular edition - it gives just the right impression and captures the ambience of the tales.

The only negative comment I had (hence the 4 star rating) was with the actual presentation of the book. Unfortunately, the publishers have attempted to cram all the stories into a 480-page book. This has resulted in an oversized hardcover, with rather small font, and worst of all, newspaper-style columns on each page. Perhaps the intention was to emulate the original format of the stories as they appeared in The Strand in the late 1800s. Regardless, the book format is therefore slightly unwieldy because of its size and is a little hard to read.

Despite this shortcoming, I'd recommend this classic collection to anyone and this edition is definitely worth the price.

The book is oversized but I agree with the previous reviewer that the print is too small--luckily, I found "The Annotated Sherlock Holmes" edited by William S. Baring-Gould at a used bookstore and is the BEST complete Sherlock Holmes collection I have EVER seen and the supplemental material is extensive and staggeringly wonderful--try to find that one (it will probably be in 2 volumes)in the used book section of this site...