Holmes has been everywhere lately! Robert Downey has played him in a recent brace of blockbuster movies. And because I wanted to read the series in canon order, that meant waiting before reading anything Holmes.Īnd then, Hollywood happened. I grudged the $0.99 Amazon wanted me to pay for the e-book edition of a novel first published 101 years before I sold my hard copy of it. This included parts of the Holmes Canon, but among the exceptions was this book. I meant to use the device only to read books that I could download for free. I also didn’t read this book when I got my first Kindle. They are the bane of reading and the germ of procrastination. This, together with a few other experiences, has taught me to avoid omnibus editions. This is partly due to the repulsive, eye-straining layout of the book, and partly due to its uncomfortable heft. One almost had to give the book away it seemed more a doorstop or a paperweight than something actually to be read. I saw piles of the same edition marked down for clearance at the late and lamented Borders as recently as 2006. I had that book for several years, and read many of the shorter Holmes tales before I sold it in a garage sale circa 1988. I didn’t read this book when I owned an omnibus volume called The Complete Sherlock Holmes. The Holmes canon now includes four novels and 56 short stories, written over a period of 40 years, but it all began here. Just imagine: It was the first anyone had ever heard of Sherlock Holmes! Then a young physician, just starting to stretch his literary muscles, Arthur Conan Doyle here created a character who has become one of the most enduring figures in the popular imagination. When detective fiction was still in its infancy, in the year 1887, this novel first appeared in an issue of Beeton’s Christmas Annual.
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