Description

It has been three years since Sherlock Holmes fell to his death after a showdown with his brilliant enemy Moriarity at Reichenbach Falls. Believing his friend to be dead, Doctor John Watson has moved on with his life. That is, until he discovers Sherlock Holmes alive and in disguise one afternoon in a London shop. A whole new series of adventures awaits Holmes and Watson, and the consulting detective must use the science of deduction to solve new mysteries, while explaining his own supposed death and disappearance to Watson.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes was published eight years after The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, in which Holmes’ character was killed. But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s readers were desperate for more of Holmes’ adventures, so he brought the character back in the first short story in this collection, “The Empty House.” Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories have been adapted numerous times, including the 2009 and 2011 movies starring Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr., and for the popular television shows Elementary, starring Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu, and the BBC’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. The first episode of Sherlock’s third series, named “The Empty Hearse,” references “The Empty House” from this volume.

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About the author(s)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859. Before starting his writing career, Doyle attended medical school, where he met the professor who would later inspire his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes. A Study in Scarlet was Doyle's first novel; he would go on to write more than sixty stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. He died in England in 1930.

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