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A chronological overview of the 62 Sherlock Holmes stories and novels
dimanche 19 mai 2024, par
1. OVERVIEWS OF THE 58 SHERLOCK HOLMES STORIES, in chronological order
2. OVERVIEWS OF THE 4 SHERLOCK HOLMES NOVELS, in chronological order
3. THE INDEX OF THE 62 STORIES AND NOVELS, in alphabetical order
The complete text of each of these works can be seen by clicking on the titles.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
1. THE 58 SHERLOCK HOLMES STORIES
| DATE | TITLE____________________________ | SYNOPSIS___________________________________________________________________________ | WORDS | |
| 1 | 1891-07 | A Scandal in Bohemia | The King of Bohemia makes an incognito visit to Sherlock Holmes hoping that he will somehow be able to recuperate the very compromising letters that he had written to a woman and that threaten to ruin his marriage and his regime. But Irene Adler – always referred to afterwards by Sherlock as the woman – turns out to be a match even for the great detective. | 8,500 |
| 2 | 1891-08 | The Red-headed League | A pawnbroker comes to Sherlock in dismay on finding that his very well-paid employment with a generous association for red-headed people like him has suddenly come to an end without explanation. Sherlock is pleased to investigate this unusual situation on the spot. | 9,120 |
| 3 | 1891-09 | A Case of Identity | A very flustered young woman comes to Baker Street to ask Sherlock to investigate the disappearance of her fiancé on the very doorstep of the church in which they were to be married. A much more devious case than it would seem to be. | 7,000 |
| 4 | 1891-10 | The Boscombe Valley Mystery | Sherlock investigates the widely-publicized murder of a wealthy farmer in the west of England for which his son has been arrested, on the strength of very strong evidence as he was seen coming back from the scene of the crime with a shotgun. But although the police are convinced of his guilt after his testimony at the inquest, Sherlock isn’t, and he explains to the dubious Dr. Watson just why not. | 9,600 |
| 5 | 1891-11 | The FIve Orange Pips | A young man’s uncle and then his father had been found murdered shortly after having received a mysterious envelope containing five orange pips. The young man comes up to London to ask Sherlock for help after having received a five-pip letter himself. | 7,300 |
| 6 | 1891-12 | The Man With the Twisted Lip | An old friend of Dr. Watson’s wife comes to see her asking for help in bringing back her husband from an infamous East End opium den. Which Dr. Watson does – and in the process finds Sherlock there in disguise trying to locate a man who had disappeared and who had last been seen in that same establishment in the company of a deformed beggar with a very twisted lip. | 9,200 |
| 7 | 1892-01 | The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle | Dr. Watson pays a Christmas visit to Sherlock and finds him pondering over an old felt hat that had been knocked off the head of a man carrying a goose who had been attacked by ruffians but scared off by a policeman. The policeman had brought both the hat and the goose to Sherlock in the hope that he could help find the proprietor of the goods, and had gone off with the goose for his own Christmas dinner while Sherlock carries out a particularly brilliant series of reasonings to not only accomplish his mission but also to thwart a particularly important crime. | 7,800 |
| 8 | 1892-02 | The Adventure of the Speckled Band | In the early days of Dr. Watson’s friendship with Sherlock they had both been woken up early one morning by a woman in distress who had come up to London from Surrey to ask for her help as she felt in grave danger of suffering the fate of her beloved sister who had died in mysterious circumstances two years previously and whose last words had been “the speckled band”. | 9,800 |
| 9 | 1892-03 | The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb | The case of a young engineer who had been hired to leave London late at night to repair an important hydraulic press and who had survived the experience at the cost of one of his thumbs that had been hacked off with a cleaver. | 8,300 |
| 10 | 1892-03 | The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor | Lord Robert St. Simon had just married a young and very wealthy American bride but at the wedding breakfast just after the ceremony the bride had left the table and could no longer be found. Sherlock investigates. | 8,100 |
| 11 | 1892-04 | The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet | A prominent banker had taken home for safekeeping over the weekend a precious coronet that had been confided to him by one of the most prominent figures in the country as security for a major short-term loan, but the coronet had disappeared the following morning. Sherlock is urgently called upon to find it before an enormous scandal erupts. | 9,700 |
| 12 | 1892-06 | The Adventure of the Copper Beeches | A governess had reluctantly accepted a posting in a remote country house, the Copper Beaches, where she had been required to cut off her luxuriant hair in exchange for an exceptionally high salary. She telegraphs to Sherlock to come to investigate when the behaviour of her bizarre employer becomes menacing. | 10,000 |
| 13 | 1892-12 | the Adventure of Silver Blaze | The trainer of the racing horse Silver Blaze, the favourite of the Wessex Cup, has been murdered and the famous horse has disappeared, so both Scotland Yard and the desperate owner have telegraphed Sherlock for help. He and Doctor Watson rush down to the stables in Exeter in the south-west of England to try to unravel the mystery before the all-important race begins four days later. | 9,600 |
| 14 | 1893-01 | The Adventure of the Cardboard Box | A sedate lady of fifty has received through the mail a cardboard box containing two recently-severed human ears ! Scotland Yard can find no explanation for this gruesome dispatch and they ask Sherlock to investigate, with surprising results indeed. | 8,700 |
| 15 | 1893-02 | The Yellow Face | A very distraught young man comes to the Baker Street office to ask for help in saving his marriage, as his beloved young wife has seen paying secret visits to a mysterious neighbouring villa where on occasion a strange yellow face appears at its window. The result of Sherlock’s investigation is very positive indeed for the young man and his family. | 7,500 |
| 16 | 1893-03 | The Stockbroker’s Clerk | On the point of taking up a new employment in a prestigious City firm, an unemployed clerk is offered a munificent salary by a businessman if he’ll renounce his City job and take up instead an exceptionally high-paid position in Birmingham. But shortly after he takes up his new employment there he realizes that he has been tricked for an unknown reason, and rushed down to Baker Street for help. Sherlock and Doctor Watson accompany him back to Birmingham and what they find there is grim indeed. | 6,800 |
| 17 | 1893-04 | The “Gloria Scott” | Sherlock shows Doctor Watson papers from his very first case, one that had decided him to take up his future profession. He explains to the Doctor how a tragedy during a visit to his only friend – the stroke that the friend’s father had had on receiving a coded message – had led to the unravelling of a terrifying tale of mutiny and murder on the high seas. | 7,800 |
| 18 | 1893-05 | The Musgrave Ritual | At the very beginning of his professional career Musgrave, a former fellow student, had come into his rooms asking him to look into the sudden disappearance of his butler shortly after having been discovered secretly examining ancient papers in the Musgrave mansion’s library about a family ritual dating from feudal times. Sherlock goes down to the Musgrave manor with Doctor Watson to investigate. | 7,500 |
| 19 | 1893-06 | The Reigate Squires | Doctor Wilson takes Sherlock, who’s been ill after having worked 15 hours a day for weeks on end, to a country home of a friend for a quiet rest, where they learn on arriving that not only have there been burglaries in the neighbourhood but that the latest one has resulted in a murder. The local police are only too happy to have Sherlock’s help. | 7,200 |
| 20 | 1893-07 | The Crooked Man | Sherlock has been asked by the military authorities in Aldershot to help them understand the case of the Colonel of one of their most famous regiments who had been found murdered in his locked bedroom with his wife lying unconscious nearby, while no trace of the key to the lock of the room was to be found. | 7,100 |
| 21 | 1893-08 | The Resident Patient | At the request of a young doctor Sherlock and Doctor Watson had gone to his cabinet to investigate the traces of an attempted robbery, by two of the doctor’s clients, of his business partner’s room in the same building – and then the next day the business partner had been found hanging in his room, an apparent suicide. Sherlock needs all his skills to be able to explain to the police just what had really happened. | 6,500 |
| 22 | 1893-08 | The Greek Interpreter | Where Sherlock’s elder brother Mycroft introduces him to a Greek interpreter who tells them how he’d been kidnapped and brought basically blindfolded to a dark house in the suburbs to interrogate a fellow countryman who was being tortured and starved to death there. The combined skills of the two brilliant brothers are just enough to enable them to divine where the mystery house was located and how to act in time to save lives. | 7,000 |
| 23 | 1893-10 | The Naval Treaty | An old school friend of Dr. Watson now in the Foreign Office asks him to urgently come with Sherlock to see him about the terrible trouble he’s in – he’d gone to stretch his legs while working on a highly-secret treaty that had been confided to him and when he’d returned to his bureau the treaty had disappeared. It had to be recovered at all costs… | 12,600 |
| 24 | 1893-11 | The Final Problem | Sherlock’s determined, very dramatic and indeed very famous not to say fatal conflict with the master-mind behind almost all of London’s criminal activity, the very brilliant and very ruthless Professor Moriarty. | 7,100 |
| 25 | 1896-11 | The Field Bazaar | A quite marvellous little sketch about the campaign to raise funds for the cricket club of the University of Edinburgh, the author’s alma mater, which was the occasion for which the story – never included in any of the collections of Sherlock stories during the author’s lifetime –was written. | 1,050 |
| 26 | 1903-09 | The Adventure of the Empty House | This spectacular story opens with the account of how Doctor Watson had gone to the scene of a highly-publicized society murder and was followed him home by one of the other spectators there, who turned out to be … none other than Sherlock Holmes himself ! A resuscitated Sherlock (who promptly and efficiently investigates the society murder in question) who’d been in hiding after escaping from his apparently-fatal encounter with his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty, and whose return was welcomed with great emotion by Doctor Watson and with great enthusiasm by his enormous reading public. | 8,700 |
| 27 | 1903-10 | The Adventure of the Norwood Builder | A few months after Sherlock’s return, when Doctor Watson has given up his medical practice to share the Baker Street quarters with him again, a young man bursts into their dwelling pleading for help as he is about to be arrested for murder, his walking stick having been found in the room of a brutally murdered man. | 9,200 |
| 28 | 1903-12 | The Adventure of the Dancing Men | A visitor shows to S. & Dr. W. a message of childish hieroglyphs that have terrified his wife, and when more of these apparently-menacing messages arrive they agree to go up to his home on the east coast to investigate. But when they get there murder has been done. | 9,600 |
| 29 | 1903-12 | The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist | A young woman, who’s being regularly followed on a lonely country road on her way to work by a strange man is worried – and rightly so as it turns out – and goes down to London to see Sherlock about it. The detective cannot refuse to help a damsel in distress, and he does it most impressively. | 7,800 |
| 30 | 1904-01 | The Adventure of the Priory School | The principal of an elite preparatory school in the north of England has rushed down to London to beg Sherlock to help find the son of one of the most prominent Lords of the realm whose ten-year-old son had mysteriously disappeared overnight from the school, without trace apart from some muddled bicycle tracks. | 11,500 |
| 31 | 1904-02 | The Adventure of Black Peter | The former sailor Captain Peter Carey, known as Black Peter for his history of savage violence, has been found pierced right through with a harpoon in his ransacked house-cabin, and there are no significant clues. So the young police inspector on the job asks Sherlock to show him how to find out what has happened, which he does. | 8,100 |
| 32 | 1904-03 | The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton | Sherlock has been asked by the illustrious Lady Blackwell to negotiate with a notorious blackmailer the return of compromising letters that will cause her impending marriage to be broken off if they are publicly known. The man in question comes Baker Street for a (remarkable) interview but even Sherlock cannot make him come to a compromise agreement. So he goes into clandestine action to save the lady’s name at all costs. A terrific tale ! | 6,700 |
| 33 | 1904-04 | The Adventure of the Six Napoleons | Inspector Lestrade comes to Baker Street to talk about an unusual case that’s seemingly trivial but that he finds curious – an apparent hater of the French Emperor has been breaking into shops and people’s homes not to steal but only to smash plaster busts of him to pieces. Sherlock suspects that there’s something serious behind these excentric acts, and he’s right. | 8,300 |
| 34 | 1904-06 | The Adventure of the Three Students | A tutor and lecturer at one of the country’s great universities has discovered that an important exam paper has been illicitly copied, and to avoid a public scandal asks Sherlock to come right away to the university to identify, if at all possible before the exam date, which of the three student suspects is the guilty party. | 6,500 |
| 35 | 1904-07 | The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez | The young assistant of a professor has been found stabbed to death in the professor’s country house, clutching in his hands an expensive and rather unusual pince-nez. Inspector Hopkins can make nothing of the clue, but Sherlock can. | 9,000 |
| 36 | 1904-08 | The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter | The star player of the Cambridge rugby team has disappeared the day before the annual match against Oxford and the police have referred the very upset captain of the team to Sherlock for finding him if at all possible before the big match. | 8,000 |
| 37 | 1904-09 | The Adventure of the Abbey Grange | The police have telegraphed Sherlock to come down to Kent where Sir Eustace has been murdered, but when he arrives on site they tell him that the case has been practically solved, as his wife had recovered her senses and identified the intruders who had attacker her and her husband as the members of an infamous local band of robbers. Sherlock has a closer look at the evidence and the real investigation begins. | 9,200 |
| 38 | 1904-12 | The Adventure of the Second Stain | Doctor Watson has finally received permission from the semi-retired Sherlock to reveal the spectacular details of one of the most significant affairs os his career many years beforehand, when the Secretary of State for European Affairs had come in despair to Baker Street, accompanied by the Premier Minister himself, because a contentious top-secret letter from a foreign ruler had disappeared overnight from a locked despatch-box in his home during the night, and its publication could have the most disastrous possible consequences on the nation, including the risk of war. | 9,700 |
| 39 | 1908-08 | The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge | An eminent citizen comes to Baker Street to recount how he had been invited to the country villa of a new friend but had been left alone in the villa, and on waking up the next morning had found the villa to be deserted. As he begins his account the police arrive to interrogate him, as the young man in question had just been found murdered. | 11,400 |
| 40 | 1908-12 | The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans | A young clerk in the Arsenal office has been found dead on the Underground railway tracks with some highly-secret military papers on him. Sherlock’s highly-placed brother Mycroft rushes over to Baker street to urgently request him to locate at all costs the rest of the missing papers and prevent them from falling into the hands of a continental power. | 9,700 |
| 41 | 1910-12 | The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot | Sherlock has been given strict doctor’s orders to take a much-needed holiday, so he and Doctor Watson are enjoying the fresh air of an isolated Cornish villa when the sister of a neighbour is found dead in her cottage with an expression of extreme horror on her face, and her two brothers in the same room have suddenly become raving maniacs. The well-known detective is asked to investigate what could have happened. | 9,700 |
| 42 | 1911-03 | The Adventure of the Red Circle | Sherlock cannot refuse the pleas for help of his landlady who is concerned about a mysterious lodger who never leaves his room for weeks on end and seems to be up to no good. Sherlock finds that her worries are more than justified. | 9,700 |
| 43 | 1911-12 | The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax | A former well-known English society beauty living in Lausanne seems to have disappeared and Sherlock asks Doctor Watson to go there and report, which he does to his own satisfaction but not to Sherlock’s. In fact the lady is in grave danger from international criminals and Sherlock’s powers are pushed to their limit in an inspired effort to save her. | 9,700 |
| 44 | 1913-11 | The Adventure of the Dying Detective | Sherlock Holmes’s landlady comes to desperation to Doctor Watson’s office to beg him to try to save her beloved tenant who’s desperately ill. The Doctor finds him in a terrible state indeed, having refused to eat or drink for days, and rushes off to the one person in London whom Sherlock says might be able to cure him of the terrible tropical disease that he’d contracted on the docks. | 9,700 |
| 45 | 1917-09 | His Last Bow : The War Service of Sherlock Holmes | The German master spy in England is having a final conference with the chief secretary of the German legation hours before the outbreak of the Great War, full of confidence because of the vast penetration of British military secrets that the master spy has achieved that will provide their nation with decisive advantages in the conflict that they know is coming. But they haven’t taken into account what has been done by a particular British agent to counter them. | 9,700 |
| 46 | 1921-10 | The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone | The Prime Minister himself has come to Sherlock to ask him to recover by any means a great diamond that has been stolen from Whitehall, undoubtedly by one of the most dangerous criminals in the kingdom. Who brazenly comes to see Sherlock, fully armed, to warn him to stop getting in his way or else. | 5,700 |
| 47 | 1922-02 | The Problem of Thor Bridge | A very wealthy American who had bought an historical English estate comes to Sherlock about the celebrated case of a young governess on his estate who has been accused of the murder of his wife, and who in all likelihood will be condemned on account of the overwhelming evidence against her. But the evidence is so strong against her that Sherlock suspects that there’s something suspicious about it... | 9,600 |
| 48 | 1923-03 | The Adventure of the Creeping Man | A celebrated university Professor has been behaving so strangely that his faithful dog has twice attacked him, and his faithful and his very worried personal secretary, after finding him creeping along the corridor at night on all fours, has come to Baker Street to ask Sherlock to find out what has happened to the great man. | 7,700 |
| 49 | 1924-01 | The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire | The wife of a recently-married man in Sussex has been found biting at the neck of their young baby with blood on her mouth, so she’s been shut up in her room while the distraught husband comes to Baker Street to ask him to investigate the reality of this astonishing case of vampirism. | 6,000 |
| 50 | 1924-06 | How Watson Learned the Trick | A tricky little tale – never included in any of the collections of Sherlock stories during the author’s lifetime – where Doctor Watson somewhat unsuccessfully displays to Sherlock his own analytical skills. | 508 |
| 51 | 1924-10 | The Adventure of the Three Garridebs | Sherlock has been asked for help by a certain Mr. Garrideb in locating any third person of that name, as he has been informed by an American businessman of the same name that a large estate in America has been willed to the possessors of that unusual name as long as they are at least three – but so far none other can be located. Sherlock senses that foul play is afoot, and he proves it. | 6,200 |
| 52 | 1924-11 | The Adventure of the Illustrious Client | A notorious continental criminal has captured the heart of a young society beauty on a cruise and she refused to listen to her family’s remonstrances and denunciation of the man’s past. In desperation the family turns to Sherlock, but the man hesitates at nothing and Sherlock barely survives the ordeal. | 9,800 |
| 53 | 1926-09 | The Adventure of the Three Gables | A huge black man bursts aggressively into Sherlock’s office to demand that he does not get involved in the situation of a widow who had just written to him for help. The man and his gang have made a big mistake, as Sherlock does of course go to see her to discover the reasons why the gang at all costs wants her to move out of her house. | 6,100 |
| 54 | 1926-10 | The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier | An army officer comes to Sherlock most concerned about the fate of a comrade veteran of the Boer War who has suddenly stopped corresponding with him and whose father adamantly maintains that he has gone away on a long voyage and cannot be joined. Sherlock goes down – alone, without Doctor Watson most unusually, as “the good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action which I can recall in our association” – to the estate of the violence-inclined father and manages to uncover a terrible secret indeed. | 7,700 |
| 55 | 1926-11 | The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane | After his retirement to a villa in southern England, Sherlock is deprived of the presence of Doctor Watson (“At this period of my life the good Watson had passed almost beyond my ken. An occasional week-end visit was the most that I ever saw of him”), so he recounts in his own plain words how he solved the case of a young man who had dropped dead right in front of him on top of the cliffs of Dover with a series of terrible whip-like lashes on him and no one in sight or on the beach below. | 7,200 |
| 56 | 1926-12 | The Adventure of the Retired Colourman | Scotland Yard can make nothing of the case of a retired artistic painter whose young wife has run off with a young man and his securities, and has referred the case to Sherlock. He asks Doctor Watson to visit the broken-down man’s premises and report, and one of the Doctor’s findings puts him on the track of a double murderer. | 5,500 |
| 57 | 1927-01 | The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger | A landlady has come to Baker Street on behalf of a mysterious woman who has been veiled for the seven years she has been her lodger because of her terrible disfigurations and who has information for Sherlock about a famous unsolved murder in which she was involved. | 4,500 |
| 58 | 1927-09 | The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place | The trainer of a stable of racing-horses in south-west England has come to London to ask Sherlock to investigate the strange behaviour of the stable’s very irascible owner, and shows Sherlock the burned remains of a human bone that he has found in the stable’s furnace. Sherlock’s last case is a deep one indeed. | 6,300 |
2. THE 4 SHERLOCK HOLMES NOVELS
| DATE | TITLE____________________________ | SYNOPSIS___________________________________________________________________________ | WORDS | |
| 1 | 1887-11 | A Study in Scarlet | The very first Sherlock Holmes tale and the author’s first novel, where Sherlock and Doctor Watson meet for the first time, get along famously from the start after, move into shared lodgings in the thereafter-famous address 221b Baker Street, get involved in a difficult murder case by the quite hapless Scotland Yard inspectors Gregson and Lestrade, a case that’s spectacularly unravelled by the inimitable Sherlock and whose startling origins and dramatic unfolding are brilliantly narrated by Doctor Doyle. | 43,500 |
| 2 | 1890-02 | The Sign of the Four | Sherlock Holmes is resorting to opium to allay his boredom when a young woman arrives to ask him – and Doctor Watson – to accompany her to a rendezvous that promises to reveal the mysterious fate of her father ten years previously. Off they go to begin to unravel, thanks to the quite extraordinary reasoning powers of the by-now-everyone’s-favorite detective, not only the fate of the poor lady’s husband but also of the fabulous treasure of an Indian rajah that is the leitmotif of this palpitating and brain-stimulating novel chock full of drama. And you’ll never guess what happens to Doctor Watson at the end… |
43,200 |
| 3 | 1901-08 | The Hound of the Baskervilles | The most famous – and probably the greatest – novel in the history of crime fiction, a dramatic murder mystery in the eerie, desolate and dangerous Dartmoor Downs in Devon where Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion and formidable narrator Doctor Watson investigate at great risks to themselves the menace of a mysterious wild beast that threatens to put an end to one of the most ancient dynasties of the region. | 59,000 |
| 4 | 1914-09 | The Valley of Fear | At the very beginning of this dramatic final Sherlock Holmes novel he receives a coded message from a secret contact in the underworld – the underworld of Sherlock’s arch-enemy Professor Moriarty – warning of imminent danger to a prominent citizen, and just when Sherlock had succeeded in decoding the message a Scotland Yard Inspector calls on him to announce that the citizen in question had just been murdered. That leads Sherlock, Doctor Watson and Inspector MacDonald on the trail of The Scowrers, a mysterious murder fraternity of unheard-of brutality in a mining community in the far reaches of the western USA well-named The Valley of Fear, a trail that Sherlock manages to unravel but that finally – and unfortunately for one of the main protagonists – leads back to that evil mastermind of international criminality, the quite-untouchable Professor Moriarty. |
58,000 |