The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes brings together twelve of the master detective's most celebrated cases. What is the secret of the speckled band that brings death in its wake? What terrible villainy is going on behind the respectable façade of the house at Copper Beeches? How has a priceless diamond found its way into the gullet of a goose? Why does an envelope containing five orange pips inspire such terror in its recipients? And what of the clever and beautiful Irene Adler, who proves more than a match for the famous detective? For the eagle-eyed Sherlock Holmes no challenge is too great. Aided by his faithful friend Dr Watson he uses his razor-sharp wit and remarkable powers of deduction to solve the seemingly unsolvable.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). Best known as the creator of the brilliant amateur sleuth Sherlock Holmes and his side-kick Dr Watson, Conan Doyle's stories, with their ingenious plots and wonderful sense of late-Victorian England, are still read the world over. Born in Edinburgh in 1859, the son of a civil servant, Arthur Conan Doyle was educated at Stonyhurst School and then spent a year in Austria before taking a degree in medicine at Edinburgh University. He later drew on the method of diagnosis used by one of his professors for the basis of Sherlock Holmes's own deductive methods and elementary approach to solving mysteries. Conan Doyle graduated in 1885 and set up as a doctor in Southsea. In order to supplement his income and fill in the quiet moments at work, he started to write detective stories. A Study in Scarlet, which appeared in 1887, introduced the hawk-eyed detective whose popular appearances in stories such as The Sign of Four turned both him and his creator into household names. Many short stories, such as A Scandal in Bohemia, A Case of Identity, The Man With the Twisted Lip and The Copper Beeches were first published in the Strand Magazine and then in 1892 collected as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. A further selection of stories was collected in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). Conan Doyle's other novels and stories were often overshadowed by his most famous creation, and in December 1893 he killed off Holmes (together with the arch-criminal Professor Moriarty) in a drama set in Austria. Holmes was later resurrected in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), when Conan Doyle succumbed to public pressure and revealed that the sleuth had been able to cheat death after all. Further collections of stories were published as The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. With his growing success as an author, Conan Doyle was able to give up his practice and concentrate on many other things. He was a passionate advocate for causes as diverse as divorce law reform, the Channel Tunnel and the issuing of steel helmets to soldiers and inflatable life jackets to sailors. He was also a great campaigner on behalf of individuals wrongly imprisoned, and his work on the Edalji case was instrumental in the introduction of the Court of Criminal Appeal. He was knighted in 1902 for his defence of British policy in the South African war. After the death of his son as a result of a wound in the First World War, Coran Doyle became a spiritualist, and his later work such as The Wanderings is heavily concerned with this. He died in 1930. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was the first collection of stories about the Baker Street detective to be brought together in one volume. It first appeared in 1892.