The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Kobo (e-book), 1892
307 pages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Sherlock_Holmes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle
This was a free e-book from www.kobo.com.
BLURB FROM THE COVER
It’s elementary, dear readers: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the greatest collection of detective stories ever written. Penned by Arthur Conan Doyle, they first introduced the magical and eccentric Holmes to the readers of The Strand Magazine. In his consulting room at 221B Baker Street, the master sleuth receives a stream of desperate clients all with baffling and bizarre puzzles for him to solve–and thanks to his intuition and logic, he never fails to crack the case.
EXTRACT
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA
REVIEW
I really enjoyed The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle uses quite old fashioned and formal language but the tales are so bizarre and well-written that I enjoyed every page. I enjoyed some tales in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes more than others. My favourites were The Adventure of the Red-Headed League, The Five Orange Pips, The Man with the Twisted Lip, The Adventure of the Speckled Band and The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb. The tales stood out because they were the most bizarre and at time Holmes’s investigation moved into slightly darker territory than the other tales. The other tales were really good but these stood out from the rest. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes has a stiff-upper lip Britishness that I enjoyed. At times, Holmes is so dead-pan and all proper and above board when revealing his deductions to a bemused Watson and his various stunned client I couldn’t help grin. I really enjoyed reading about Holmes’s deductions and the apparent ease with which he solved some bizarre cases. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is very enjoyable.
RATING
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