Sherlock Holmes

Edgar Allan Poe is considered to have written the first detective stories in the English language in the 1840s with his three tales of Auguste Dupin. Likely the next notable English-language mystery novel was The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins, published in book form in 1868. But there is no question that Arthur Conan Doyle's creation, Sherlock Holmes, made the detective story a genre.

The character of Holmes himself, rational observer and interpreter of the finest detail, was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, one of Doyle's instructors at medical school. In Doyle's stories, Holmes from time to time makes disparaging remarks about Poe's Dupin, I suspect as a way of a backhanded tribute to Poe as part of the Doyle's' inspiration to write a detective story. Ultimately, Doyle wrote 56 short stories and four novels featuring Sherlock Holmes and his friend and chronicler, Dr. Watson. Sherlockians today refer to those as "The Canon."

Holmes achieved such popularity that Doyle, feeling that Holmes was distracting him from his other, better writings (aside: I've read some of them--they aren't, but The Lost World is kind of fun), tried to kill him off at the Reichenbach Falls in the 1893 story, "The Final Problem." Bowing to public demand, he brought Holmes back to life in "The Adventure of the Empty House" a decade later.

Something about the character of Holmes has resonated with the public for the last century and a half. He has been honored, satirized, derided, and parodied in pastiches and fan fiction to this day. Numerous movies and radio and television shows have recreated stories from the Canon and created new stories based on the (sometimes re-imagined) characters of Holmes and Watson. In some cases, the stories represent original scripts; in others, they are based on allusions to unchronicled cases in the original stories; some are cut new from whole cloth. (An example of the last would be "Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula" in this collection; Holmes, the ultimate rationalist, would not have countenanced the existence of so fantastic creature as a human vampire.)

The stories in this collection represent a wide range of Sherlock Holmes adventures from British and American radio, plus sound tracks from several of the movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. The "BBC Radio Collection," in particular, includes adaptations of the original novels and short stories, plus The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Put on your smoking jacket, light your pipe, and enjoy.

For more Sherlockiana, visit the Baker Street Irregulars.

Series description provided by Frank Bell.