Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893, in the short story 'The Final Problem', but was tempted to bring him back to life ten years later, in the thirteen tales that comprise The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
While the outcry that supposedly followed Holmes' death was mostly apocryphal (the claim that readers wore black armbands in mourning has been frequently cited but never actually proved), by 1893 there was a substantial readership for Holmes' two series of adventures published in the Strand Magazine and two earlier novels. Doyle returned to Holmes in 1901-2 with The Hound of the Baskervilles, a novel set before the events of 'The Final Problem'; the commercial success of the serialisation in the Strand led Doyle to consider reviving the Holmes stories on a longer-term basis. Accordingly, in 1903 Doyle was contracted by the American magazine Collier's Weekly to supply six more Holmes stories; the agreement was extended to six more, with a final extension for a thirteenth story ('The Second Stain') that Doyle (mistakenly) believed to be the closing episode of the Holmes adventures. These thirteen tales make up this volume.
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
The Empty House
The Norwood Builder
The Dancing Men
The Solitary Cyclist
The Priory School
Black Peter
Charles Augustus Milverton
The Six Napoleons
The Three Students
The Golden Pince-Nez
The Missing Three-Quarter
The Abbey Grange
The Second Stain
Explanatory Notes
Christopher Pittard (Editor) is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth and author of Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (2011), and The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes (2019).
Darryl Jones (General Editor) is Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin, where he teaches nineteenth-century literature and popular fiction. He is the author or editor of ten books, including the Oxford World's Classics editions of M. R. James's Collected Ghost Stories (2013), Arthur Conan Doyle's Gothic Tales (2018), and H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (2017) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (2017), as well as Horror: A Very Short Introduction (2021).
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