THE CASE-BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

The last official tales of the world's greatest detective

By Chris Wyatt     February 20, 2003

From early on, almost every Sherlock Holmes book was meant to be the last. In the stories collected as THE MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle actually killed off his detective. But public sentiment was so insistent, and Doyle's desire to retell the myth of the Devonshire Hell Hound was so strong, that he bowed to pressure and wrote posthumous material on Holmes, resulting in the novel THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES.

HOUND, both the most popular and the best of all the Holmes novels (and indeed one of the best of any of the Holmes stories, no matter their length) only took the Holmes phenomena to the next level. Doyle wanted to push Holmes to the side in order to pursue other, more "important" work, was confounded.

The next two book publications, MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES and HIS LAST BOW, were also attempts at an ending. BOW in particular, tried to tell the public that Holmes had retired, explaining that the detective had run off to the country to study bee-keeping, and wasn't at home to guests. If MEMOIRS had try to flame Holmes out, BOW attempted to fade him away.

But neither method worked, and Holmes came back for a final round with THE CASE BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. Included among the tales in this final volume are some of the most intricate of all the Holmes adventures, including "The Problem of Thor's Bridge" a complex little mystery that can be viewed as the forerunner to the C.S.I.-brand of mystery storytelling. And speaking of being influential, it is in the CASE BOOK's "The Sussex Vampire" that we can read a road map for future episodes of THE X-FILES.

The stories in CASE BOOK don't quite achieve the quality or the range of the stories in BOW, but they do stand up on their own. Tales like "The Mazarin Stone" and "The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger" show the formula of class meets thrills that marked Doyle as unique.

CASE BOOK is available in several editions, including both a Wordsworth and an Oxford classics edition, a CD-ROM edition by Quiet Vision, and no less then two audio book versions. Particularly reccomeded is the HaperCollins audio book, which features readings by Christopher Lee. Lee sounds a little like STAR WARS's Count Dooku, a little like LORD OF THE RING's Saruman, and a whole lot like Sherlock Holmes.

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