Sherlock Holmes was Arthur Conan Doyle's miracle. Like many
miracles, it came of its own accord and rather overwhelmed its
recipient. There may have been times when St. Paul, after his
experience on the road to Damascus, really wished he could go back
to his old life, but he couldn't, and he knew it. Conan Doyle, too,
reluctantly came to the same conclusion, though only after a
desperate struggle. He felt that the Holmes stories were taking
time and public attention away from his more serious work. So, with
great deliberation he killed off his detective in the 24th story in
the series, the ominously entitled "The Final Problem," sending
both Holmes and his arch-nemesis created for the occasion, the
"Napoleon of Crime," Dr. Moriarty, over the Reichenbach Falls in
Switzerland. That, Doyle sincerely hoped, would be the end of that.
But miracles do not stay dead, of course, even if, during the
period in which Holmes was officially deceased, the
fantasy-humorist John Kendrick Bangs, with permission, depicted the
posthumous doings of Sherlock Holmes's shade on the River Styx in
The Pursuit of the House-Boat (1897). In his unsuccessful attempt
to kill off Holmes, Doyle came very close to creating a second
immortal character, in the person of Moriarty, who has certainly
had a substantial later career in the hands of other writers. "The
Final Problem" appeared in 1893. For all Conan Doyle might have
wished otherwise, the world had not seen the last of Sherlock
Holmes. Collected here in this giant oversized volume are nine
Sherlock Homes books including A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the
Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Memoirs of Sherlock
Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Return of Sherlock
Holmes, The Valley of Fear, A Double Barreled Detective Story by
Mark Twain, and The Pursuit of the House-Boat by John Kendrick
Bangs, with an authoritative introduction by Darrell Schweitzer. No
other Holmes collection includes the books by Bangs, which was the
only use of Holmes that Doyle himself ever authorized, and Twain,
who was the most famous author other than Doyle to write a Sherlock
Holmes story. More than 1,000 pages of Sherlock Holmes mysteries.
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