For more than a century the Holmes stories have held a strange grip on the popular imagination.
This new selection of twelve of the best stories is designed to give readers a full sense of their world： the brooding fog of London, ruined heirs in creaking mansions, and hidden crimes in the farthest-flung corners of the British Empire. They take Holmess career from its early days to its close, and include the book-length The Sign of the Four. Barry McCreas introduction investigates the complex currents that lie beneath their surface.
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sign of the Four
A Scandal in Bohemia
A Case of Identity
The Red-Headed League
The Man with the Twisted Lip
The Blue Carbuncle
The Speckled Band
The Musgrave Ritual
The Greek Interpreter
The Dancing Men
The Six Napoleons
His Last Bow
Explanatory Notes
內容試閱：
Oxford Worlds Classics
For over 100 years Oxford Worlds Classics have brought readers closer to the worlds great literature. Now with over 700 titlesfrom the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth centurys greatest novelsthe series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.
The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading.
Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy, and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers.
INTRODUCTION
Barry McCrea
Among the members of the Baker Street Irregulars, the most famous society of dedicated Holmes fans, a convention known as the game requires one to treat Holmes as a real historical personage, Watson as his biographer, and Arthur Conan Doyle as the unimportant, even unreliable publisher of Watsons writings. The Irregulars practice, playful as it is, points to a real truth about the Holmes stories： the huge gulf that separates Holmes and his creator. The stories are proof, if it was ever needed, that the writer and the work are wholly distinct entities. Doyle thought of the stories as a trivial and frivolous distraction from his real literary ambitions, and his several attempts to kill off his creation were all foiled. Holmes is a bohemian bachelor
who abhors family life, whereas Doyle was a middle-class professional and devoted family man. The Holmes adventures are, along with the novels of Charles Dickens, the quintessential London stories, even though Doyle was a Scot who did not even know London that well he had to use a Post Office map while writing them to help with street names and directions. Most of all, Holmess unrelenting devotion to reason and hard facts, and his disdain for superstition, are at odds with the character of a man who devoted his greatest efforts to spiritualism and the paranormal; Doyle was a peculiar mixture of scientific rigour and a navet that at times bordered on philistinism his conviction as to the authenticity of the infamous Cottingley fairy photos, for examplein which children had added paper cut-outs of dancing fairies to photographs of themselves in the gardenmade him an object of some ridicule.
Doyles first stories, written while he was studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh, were more in keeping with his idiosyncratic mix of the scientific and the supernatural. He had some modest success with them, but his breakthrough came with a short novel, A Study in Scarlet, stripped of his usual paranormal or Gothic flights of fancy, a highly rational crime-story narrated by one John Watson, adoctor just back from military duty in Afghanistan, who is wandering London in search of a flatmate. He ends up sharing with an eccentric private detective called Sherlock Holmes, a character partly modelled on Joseph Bell, who had been one of Doyles teachers at Edinburgh. Holmes asks Watson to accompany him in his investigation the device of having the story narrated by the detectives live-in companion was borrowed from Edgar Allan Poes creation C. Auguste Dupin. Doyle had no luck in getting his novella published until it was finally fished from the slush pile of a downmarket publishing house, Ward, Lock and Company, who specialized in cheap, sensationalist fiction. It was published in 1887 in Beetons Christmas Annual. Doyle received a modest fee for the text and was forced to relinquish all copyright to the publishers.
A Study in Scarlet was well received, and although Doyle was more interested in promoting his long historical novel Micah Clarke, he accepted a commission from an American publisher to write another Holmes narrative, the short novel that became The Sign of the Four.
Following this novels success, Doyle hit upon a new genre for his detective： a series of short stories, each complete in itself, but involving the same principal characters of Holmes and his companion Watson. The first of these was A Scandal in Bohemia, and the stories were published serially in the Strand Magazine to immediate and enormous success. The first twelve stories were collected in 1892 in the volume The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Despite several efforts to give Holmes upincluding asking for an extortionate fee, which he claimed he was sure no publisher would agree to, for the second dozen talesDoyle continued to publish Holmes stories in theStrand, which were syndicated in American newspapers. Altogether the Holmes corpus consists of fifty-six short stories and four novels.
In addition to The Adventures, four other collections of the stories were published： The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes 1893, The Return of Sherlock Holmes 1905, His Last Bow 1917, and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes 1927.
The success of the Holmes stories allowed or forced Doyle to discontinue his ophthalmic practice and devote himself entirely to writing; they also made him, it goes without saying, a very wealthy man.
But Holmes was a constant source of irritation and self- recrimination for Doyle, who longed to spend his energies on and garner his fame from historical novels, scientific and spiritualist research, and political writings. In The Final Problem, published in 1893, he sent Holmes tumbling over a ravine in Switzerland. He recorded the writing of it in his diary with the two words Killed Holmes, but left just enough ambiguity in the ending of the story to keep the door open a sliver. In response to popular demandand pressure from his motherhe wrote a further novel, set retrospectively, before Holmes meets Watson The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1901. In 1903 he finally reversed Holmess death, concocting a complicated story of Holmess survival and intervening travels through Italy, Persia, Sudan, and France, a period known among Sherlockians as the great hiatus and the subject of much conjecture. This allowed a final run of new stories.
However much his passions may have lain elsewhere, and however much his own sensibilities and world view were at odds with those of the detective, posterity, of course, remembers Doyle for Holmes.
There is no need to rehearse the unrivalled mass appeal of Sherlock Holmes which has now spanned three different centuries and which, far from showing signs of diminishing, seems, if anything, to be blossoming. At the time of writing, three major filmed adaptations are running in parallel on television and in cinemas. Holmess influence is palpable in all detective and crime fiction whether written or on screen. There is simply no other fictional character who comes close to having the cultural influence of Holmes. How can we account for the bewildering success of Doyles creation? What is it about the stories that has caused them to exercise such an unparalleled and enduring hold on the popular imagination?
Part of it has to do with the distinctive socio-historical backdrop to the stories. Holmes is not an obvious product of Arthur Conan Doyle, but he is clearly a product of his times. The Holmes stories are in part the result of a confluence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century currents： faith in progress but also scepticism and fears of regression; the age of empire but also of the crime and disorder of huge industrial cities; neo-Gothic flights of romantic fantasy alongside new literary commitments to unsparing social realism; sensational crime fiction and decadent aestheticism. Many of the concerns that run through the stories are peculiarly relevant to our own age. Among them we might include rapid and widespread social change; perplexity about
the economic system, how it works and how it affects the individual; newly emergent networks of information and power; the consequences of European colonial adventures coming home to roost; and, the defining word of our own times but a concept absolutely central to the Holmes stories, globalization. None of these concerns is ever addressed directly, and we are given no lectures, facts, or analysis.
There are many long digressions in the stories but none of them is political in nature although Doyle himself was a passionately political man who stood for election to Parliament. The mechanism of the stories is to focus our attention entirely on the mystery while imperceptibly exposing us to social, economic, psychological, and historical realities.
At the same time, the fascination of the past is only part of the stories draw. Many filmed adaptations recognize no limitations of historical period. The BBC television adaptation Sherlock, whose first series was broadcast in 2010, moves Holmes, Watson, and the plots themselves seamlessly to a world of mobile phones, iPads, and
Google. There is something in the stories form, as opposed to content, that has nothing to do with historical context but which draws us in wholly and inexplicably. The stories deal with the most primordial dynamics of storytelling： how information is withheld and revealed.
Watson, supposedly the mere biographer and assistant of the great detective, is quietly central to the stories appeal and to their underlying meaning. He is our way into the stories because we learn the facts more or less as he does or at least as he chooses to reveal them to us; we cannot know something that Watson does not know, and because his blindness and puzzlement in the face of these facts mirror our own experience of reading the story. The sense that Watson incarnates of missing the big picture, of not getting how everything really fits together, is part of our experience of life itself.
What everyone seems to be agreed uponcasual readers, diehard fans, and literary scholars alikeis that the whole of the stories adds up somehow to more than the sum of their parts. Even as they grab and hold our attention with the solving of crimes and enigmas, they expose us to other things entirely, and leave us with other, unsolved mysteries.
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