Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Title: Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.
Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Genre: Fiction, literature, short stories, mystery, detective fiction, crime.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1894.
Summary: A collection of 12 Sherlock Holmes stories. Silver Blaze focuses on the disappearance of the eponymous race horse (a famous winner) on the eve of an important race, and on the apparent murder of its trainer. In The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, Miss Susan Cushing of Croydon receives a parcel in the post that contains two severed human ears packed in coarse salt. In The Adventure of the Yellow Face, Mr. Grant Munro suspects his wife of deception when she asks for money for undisclosed reasons, and he sees a strange yellow face in an unoccupied cottage on his property. In The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk a young clerk, Hall Pycroft, consults Holmes with his suspicions concerning a company that has offered him a very well-paid job. In The Adventure of the Gloria Scott, the first case to which Holmes applied his powers of deduction, a young Holmes spends a holiday at the home of a classmate, Victor Trevor, and has to solve a mystery when Trevor's father receives a seemingly meaningless letter that induces a stroke of shock. In The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual, a young Holmes receives a visit from a university acquaintance, Reginald Musgrave, after the disappearance of two of his domestic staff, Rachel Howells, a maid, and Richard Brunton, the longtime butler, a pair that vanishes after Musgrave had dismissed Brunton for secretly reading a family document, the Musgrave Ritual. In The Adventure of the Reigate Squire, while on a holiday with Watson in Surrey, Sherlock's services are needed when there is a burglary at the nearby Acton estate, in which the thieves stole a motley assortment of things but nothing valuable, and then news of a murder at another nearby estate is announced. In The Adventure of the Crooked Man, Colonel James Barclay is dead, apparently by violence, and his wife Nancy is the prime suspect, being the only one found with the body after a fight and a commotion in a locked room. In The Adventure of the Resident Patient, Doctor Percy Trevelyan consults Holmes about his unusual business arrangement with a man named Blessington, and his unusual two new patients, a father and a son, who appear to burglar Blessington. In The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter, Mycroft, Holmes's brilliant older brother, consults him on a case of Mr. Melas, a Greek interpreter who gets called to a job and kidnapped on the way there, taken to an abused and starved hostage from whom, while under the pretense of translating papers for him, he extracts some information about the crime being perpetrated on him. In The Adventure of the Naval Treaty, Dr. Watson receives a letter from an old schoolmate, now a Foreign Office employee from Woking, who has had an important naval treaty inexplicably stolen from his office in a very short period of time. In The Final Problem, Holmes's greatest opponent, the criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarty, who continuously tries to murder Holmes, and maybe just succeeds.
My rating: 8.5/10.
♥ “...I follow my own methods, and tell as much or as little as I choose. That is the advantage of being unofficial.”
♥ “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
~~Silver Blaze.
♥ An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very center of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.
~~The Munsgrave Ritual.
♥ “I don’t think you need to alarm yourself,” said I. “I have usually found that there was method in his madness.”
“Some folk might say there was madness in his method,” muttered the Inspector.
~~The Reigate Puzzle.
♥ A depleted bank account had caused me to postpone my holiday, and as to my companion, neither the country nor the sea presented the slightest attraction to him. He loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumor or suspicion of unsolved crime. Appreciation of Nature found no place among his many gifts, and his only change was when he turned his mind from the evil-doer of the town to track down his brother of the country.
~~The Resident Patient.
♥ “My ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class. But, none the less, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”
♥ “My dear Watson,” said he, “I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.”
~~The Greek Interpreter.
♥ “There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,” said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. “It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, nor a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
~~The Naval Treaty.
♥ “I think you know me well enough, Watson, to understand that I am by no means a nervous man. At the same time, it is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.”
~~The Final Problem.