The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

1. What is the difference between observing something and simply seeing it? Try describing, from memory, the shoes of someone you sat near today.
2. What can you reasonably guess about a stranger from their appearance alone — and where does a fair guess turn into an unfair assumption?
3. Why do you think mystery stories are so satisfying? What does a good mystery promise the reader?
4. Detective stories usually follow a set of unwritten rules, such as giving the reader every clue the detective gets. What would make you feel cheated by a mystery's ending?
5. How would solving a crime in the 1890s differ from solving one today, with no cameras, computers, DNA testing, or telephones in most homes?
6. Holmes is described as brilliant but difficult company. Can someone be admirable and hard to like at the same time?

• Observation versus deduction: Holmes gathers small facts and then reasons from them, and the two steps are worth separating as you read.
• Appearance versus reality: nearly every story turns on someone or something not being what it first appears to be.
• Justice versus the law: Holmes sometimes decides that the legally correct outcome is not the right one, and he acts on that judgment.
• The limits of the narrator: Watson is honest but not all-knowing, so notice what he records without understanding.
• Class, money, and reputation: characters take enormous risks to protect fortunes, inheritances, and their standing in society.
• Friendship as the story's anchor: beneath the puzzles, this is a book about two very different men who trust each other completely.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and trained as a doctor at the University of Edinburgh. One of his professors, a surgeon named Joseph Bell, could astonish patients by deducing their occupation and travels from small physical details — and Doyle later admitted he had built Sherlock Holmes directly on that memory. Doyle began writing fiction while waiting for patients in a slow medical practice, introduced Holmes in 1887, and became world-famous when the short stories began appearing in The Strand Magazine in 1891. He grew so tired of his detective that he tried to kill the character off, only to give in years later to furious public demand. Doyle wrote a great deal besides Holmes — historical novels, science fiction, and non-fiction — but it is the man at Baker Street the world remembers.

The stories are set in the London of the 1880s and 1890s, the largest city on earth at the time, and their world runs on gaslight, horse-drawn cabs, telegrams, and railway timetables — details that drive the plots as surely as any clue. Policing was still young: Scotland Yard had only recently formed a detective branch, fingerprinting was not yet in use, and there was no forensic laboratory to send evidence to, so a detective who could actually read physical traces seemed almost magical. The stories reached readers through The Strand Magazine, a cheap illustrated monthly bought by a newly literate mass audience that queued at newsstands for each installment. Doyle was also writing in a young genre — Edgar Allan Poe had invented the analytical detective a generation earlier — and it was these twelve stories that fixed its shape: the brilliant investigator, the loyal narrator, the baffled police, and the final explanation.