Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

All of the stories within The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are told in a first-person narrative from the point of view of Dr. Watson, as is the case for all but four of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Doyle suggests that the short stories contained The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes tend to point out social injustices, such as “a king’s betrayal of an opera singer, a stepfather’s deception of his ward as a fictitious lover, an aristocratic crook’s exploitation of a failing pawnbroker, a beggar’s extensive estate in Kent. It suggests that, in contrast, Holmes is portrayed as offering a fresh and fair approach in an unjust world of “official incompetence and aristocratic privilege”. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes contains many of Doyle’s favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. In 1927, he submitted a list of what he believed were his twelve best Sherlock Holmes stories to The Strand Magazine. Among those he listed were “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (as his favourite), “The Red-Headed League” (second), “A Scandal in Bohemia” (fifth) and “The Five Orange Pips” (seventh). The book was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929 because of its alleged “occultism”, but the book gained popularity in a black market of similarly banned books, and the restriction was lifted in 1940.