Customer Reviews

The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes

5 star:		(187)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

In Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the world's best known and (arguably) most fully realized literary characters. Since Doyle's death, there have been plenty of people writing knockoffs of his stories. But with rare exceptions (Nicholas Meyer comes to mind), most have not lived up to the high standards Doyle set in at least the best of his Holmes tales.

This volume includes the complete canon of Doyle's original stories -- four novels and fifty-six short stories, from "A Study in Scarlet" to "His Last Bow." While there are a handful of cases that bore significantly on international affairs (e.g. "The Bruce-Partington Plans"), most of them are of interest simply because of that touch of the _outre_ that Holmes loved so much and that provided such stimulating material to the ideal reasoner.

There are some clunkers in the canon, of course, but the vast majority of these stories -- especially the earliest ones -- are just brilliant. If you are reading them for the first time, I envy you; the sturdy Dr. John Watson is about to introduce you to a new world, a world of Victorian gaslight and Stradivarius violins, of hansom cabs and cries of "The game's afoot!"

For in reading this volume you will find such classic tales as "The Red-Headed League" and "The Man With The Twisted Lip"; you will encounter the famous dog that did nothing in the night-time ("Silver Blaze") and several versions of Holmes's favorite maxim ("When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"); and you will meet one of the most fascinating and memorable characters ever to spring from the printed page: Holmes himself.

Perhaps most importantly, you will catch a glimpse of the world as an ideal reasoner might see it -- not as a grab-bag of random atomic facts in which our own role is negligible, but as a vast interconnected whole in which each part bears some necessary relation to the rest, and in which the reasoned pursuit of justice in all matters great and small is the business of each and every one of us.

Incidentally, the twentieth-century philosopher who presented that vision most consistently and cogently is, to my own mind, Brand Blanshard, and any Holmes readers who are interested in philosophy may enjoy investigating Blanshard's works as well.

I loved reading these classic Sherlock Holmes stories. The writing still holds up! This is why they are making a new movie, staring Robert Downey, Jr. Because they're great mysteries by a great writer.

Linked table of contents and formatting looked and worked great on my Kindle and also on my iPod Touch.

I personally didn't find any typos or formatting errors (just some words are with the proper british spellings) and I enjoyed reading every single story in this collection.

A great read and an awesome value for under a dollar...

I love the Sherlock Holmes mysteries and have enjoyed many a bedtime story with the great sleuth, so it was with great anticipation that I purchased the Kindle version of this volume of short stories. I was sadly disappointed, though, to find that apparently the publishers did not understand the audience that buys short story collections; they did not bother to include something most basic and needful in an anthology - a table of contents. Without a table of contents the reader has no choice but to start at page one and hit "Next Page" hundreds of times to access stories further into the volume. This is a ridiculous oversight that completely ruins the experience of picking up a good collection of short stories and choosing a story to read at a whim based on the title. If one cannot see all of the titles in an included table of contents, then one is forced to start at the beginning and read them all chronologically. This may work in a novel, but it decidely does not work as a format for a collection of short stories. Please actually keep the reader in mind the next time that you publish a Kindle version of short stories. Include a table of contents.

Thrilled recently to discover the excellent Jeremy Brett filmed episodes of Sherlock Holmes, I then took to reading the original stories and enjoyed virtually every one of them. There are a few plots which nearly duplicate other ones, but the 56 short stories and 4 novels comprise a stunning collection of fiction which evokes the atmosphere of late Victorian era England in a straightforward prose that grabs you instantly and makes you turn page after page and then read story after story. As you get further and further into the world Doyle created, you'll begin to hear the sounds of horse carriages, smell candles and gas lamps, and also, in the manner of Holmes, to begin to truly NOTICE the small details of life which may end up meaning far more than they seem to at first. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most intriguing characters in all of literature. You'll end up wishing you could've met him or, even better, followed him into the bowels of London or into the English countryside as he probes a mystery, running only on adrenalin. I also recommend Doyle's fine book of "Round The Fire" stories.

I discovered Sherlock Holmes via a couple of short stories in anthologies in the late 1950's, when I was in 7th grade. These whetted my appetite for more, so I was tickled to discover a copy of this book (in an earlier printing) at the house of a friend. I wish it had been available as a multi-volume edition -- this one was mighty hard to sneak under the covers for post-bedtime reading by flashlight. And it's highly unsuited for summertime use: it'll sink your canoe or cause your hammock to sag to ground level! Still, it's a good, reasonably priced, solidly bound, and well-printed volume that should be in the library of any lover of classic mystery stories.
As for the stories themselves, they're not only THE best mysteries in the English language, but fun to read as a picture of life in the Victorian era. There are some clinkers, and some of the situations and characters are rather absurd (Doyle shares with most of his fellow-countrymen an ineptitude for writing convincing American English!), but in general I'm still amazed at Doyle's ingenuity and his convincing portrayal of life in many different sectors of society. This is one of the few favorite books from my childhood that I still enjoy -- not as an exercise in nostalgia but as a Good Read.

This is a Kindle-specific review by AGB.

Value for money: an excellent discount set (but with a few faults) of one of the classics of literature: the 4 long novels and the 5 volumes of short stories.

Presentation and Format: clean and attractive, with the text set fully justified..

Cover etc.: there's a simple, attractive cover, though no further illustrations.

Opening Linked Table of Contents: there's a full Linked ToC to either the beginning of each of the novels, or each of the short stories. There's an error in the ToC of Volume 6, "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" - avid readers will be surprised at the inclusion of a hitherto unknown Holmes story, "Murder in Westminster"! This is in fact simply the second half of the previous, correct story, "The Adventure of the Second Stain" ("Murder...." is a newspaper headline included in the text of the story...).
(Note: the "Linked ToC" enables you skip to predetermined points in the file - individual books, chapter openings etc. Without a good one, a long or very technical work can be tiresome to navigate on the Kindle.)

Metadata
("Metadata" refers to some hidden coding that publishers insert into the text file to enable Kindle to list and display correctly the essentials of the book - Author, Title etc. Kindle owners are able to correct indexing errors - which are very, very common - via a 3rd party software program called "Mobi2Mobi", but is both annoying and time-consuming to have to do so. )

Author: incorrectly set to Index under "A" for Arthur..... Strictly speaking, he should be under "D" for Doyle, though many will prefer "C" for Conan Doyle....
(General Note: although Kindle displays author names in the form "Bram Stoker", in order for him to be positioned in the Kindle Author List under "S" for Stoker rather than "B" for Bram, the Metadata must be set by the publisher in the form "Stoker, Bram". )

Title: it's a quibble, but the set will Index under "C" for Complete.... I'd prefer "S" for, say, "Sherlock Holmes: The Complete 9 Volumes"
(General Note: although Kindle knows to ignore an opening "The" in a title, it simple takes the first proper word in the metadata title to index the book. Publishers often include words before the proper title of the book that lead Kindle to place it misleadingly in your displayed Title List.)

Search: works properly.
Lookup: works properly.
(General Note: for reasons I don't yet quite understand, a number of Kindle format books - usually at the less expensive end of the range - don't allow Search or Lookup to work properly.)

Every Holmes fan has more than one version of the Canon, and this should be among the collection as your standard 'reading copy.' Until I discovered this edition, my favorite reading version was the 1970s Ballantine editions (with great introductions ranging from Joe Gores to Ellery Queen to P.G. Wodehouse)--but sadly, that edition is out of print, and never contained the final two Conan Doyle books anyway. This oversized paperback aptly fills the modern role of a definitive edition.

As for the stories themselves, you simply can't go wrong in rediscovering or reading Holmes for the first time. Sure, Conan Doyle's stories sometimes lacked an internal logic (my favorite tale, 'The Adventure of the Red-Headed League," is riddled with plot holes). But there's a reason these have remained as classics that have never gone out of popular fashion, over a hundred years since publication: they're entertaining, cleverly written, wonderfully detailed, and often edge-of-your-seat thrilling. Included are all 57 short stories (ideal for a quite hour in your armchair, or for a commute during which you can escape to Victorian London) and the four longer novels (the most popular of which is "The Hound of the Baskervilles," but don't pass up the sublime and underrated "The Valley of Fear"). This is the ideal book for a long vacation (especially to London!), and, if I were stranded on a desert island, this is the book I'd want most with me (well, after that 'How to Build an Island-Escaping Raft from Coconuts' book).

If you haven't discovered Sherlock Holmes, this is the edition of his adventures to buy. If you read Conan Doyle long ago but haven't picked him up since, this is the edition to buy. If you've got several other Sherlock Holmes books on your shelf but want a single-volume complete edition, this is the edition to buy. As it's been said, 'There's no police like Holmes.'

I find that most "Complete Collections" tend to be presentation copies meant to look pretty on bookshelves rather than to be read. Nothing wrong with this, unless you actually want to enjoy the stories.

This set of the complete Sherlock Holmes is a highly readable and portable collection. The stories are split into two paperback novels, of the spinner-rack size, collected in a slim box. The type is standard size, so there is no loss in cramming them all into these two volumes. No frills here, just the stories.

As to the content, of course all of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales are delicious. I look forward to enjoying old favorites, and discovering new gems in this complete collection.

To be a well-rounded person, you must read the wonderful stories of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. You will be amazed by the number of English expressions and culural assumptions that originate in these stories.

The Doubleday hardcover binding was atrocious, however. I bought this edition to read completely cover-to-cover, so I concede the edition was in for some heavy use. But the bound pages began to separate from the cover on the first day. By the time I was done. the cover was separated, and the bound pages had fallen into a number of chunks. Even the title print on the spine had been struck twice and appeared sloppy. The book was damaged beyond usefulness after one reading.

Read the stories, but don't get the Doubleday hardcover.

If you are looking for Sherlock Holmes on the Kindle, get this one.

It was prepared with care -- the quotation marks are real typesetter's quotes, the dashes are proper em dashes, and it does justice to the excellent text. I've tried several Kindle editions of Sherlock Holmes books, and the majority of them look like they were done on a typewriter. The Kindle is capable of much better. Get this one.