Reading Sherlock Holmes in the Original: Which Story to Start With

Sherlock Holmes first appeared in A Study in Scarlet, a novel from 1887. Between then and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes in 1927, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote four Holmes novels and fifty-six short stories. All of them can be read free on Project Gutenberg.

Holmes often comes up as something learners want to read in the original English. The stories are good, and each case is complete in itself, which I think makes them well suited to extensive reading. But they were written more than a hundred years ago, and where you start makes a real difference. This post covers how to choose a first story and what tends to trip learners up.

Short stories before novels

There are four Holmes novels. Counting the words of the main text in the Project Gutenberg editions, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four come to about 43,000 words each, and The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear to about 59,000 and 58,000.

I think it is better to begin with the short stories rather than a novel, and not only because of length. In A Study in Scarlet, the second part suddenly moves to Utah, and for a long stretch the story is set in the past, with neither Holmes nor Watson in it. The Sign of the Four also turns into the culprit’s long account of his life near the end. A first-time reader can easily lose the thread at these points.

A short story runs roughly 7,000 to 10,000 words, one or two evenings of reading. When you finish one, a case is solved, so you get the feeling of having finished something quickly.

First: The Red-Headed League

The story I would start with is “The Red-Headed League”, the second story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It is about 9,100 words long.

The reason is that its shape is clear. A red-haired pawnbroker comes to Holmes for advice and tells, at length, the story of a strange job. Holmes listens, goes out to investigate, and explains everything at the end. The client’s story, the investigation, the solution: the basic pattern of a Holmes story is all there. The client’s problem is odd enough that you want to know what happens next.

Doyle thought highly of it too. When he picked his twelve favourite Holmes stories for The Strand Magazine in 1927, “The Red-Headed League” came second. First was “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (according to the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia). “The Speckled Band” is about 9,800 words and is the eighth story in the same collection. It makes a good second story.

If you would like something shorter to begin with, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” in the same collection is another option. At about 7,800 words, it is a Christmas-season story that begins with a goose.

Don’t start with the first story in the book

Open The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and the first story is “A Scandal in Bohemia”. Many readers start there, in order, but I would not recommend it.

The story opens with the famous line “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.” The paragraph that follows, though, is Watson describing Holmes’s character in abstract terms, with words like eclipses, predominates and abhorrent. The very start of the collection is one of its heaviest paragraphs. Stopping there would be a shame. Every story in the collection stands alone, so there is no need to read them in order.

What tends to trip learners up in Holmes

Watson’s narration. Almost every Holmes story is told by Watson in the first person. His narrative sentences are long and full of the careful phrasing of nineteenth-century writing. The dialogue is easier, with shorter sentences. If a sentence of narration defeats you, the next lines of dialogue usually show what is going on, so I would keep moving.

Words used in older senses. Early in “The Red-Headed League”, Watson says, “I was afraid that you were engaged.” Engaged here does not mean about to be married. It means busy, already occupied. The word “ejaculated” also turns up again and again in the Holmes stories, meaning simply “cried out”, a normal word for it at the time. When a dictionary gives you a surprising meaning, suspect an older usage.

Money and daily life. You will meet pounds, shillings and guineas, horse-drawn cabs and telegrams, things you rarely see today. You don’t need the exact amounts or how things worked. If you can tell expensive from cheap, you can follow the story.

Holmes’s explanations. At the end, when Holmes explains the solution, he goes through the small clues one by one, and the vocabulary suddenly gets denser. I think it is enough to grasp the outcome, even if the explanation doesn’t sink in the first time. You can reread it after you have enjoyed the story.

Finding Holmes on Project Gutenberg

On Project Gutenberg, most Holmes short stories are inside the collections. “The Red-Headed League” and “The Speckled Band” are both in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Searching for a story’s title often turns up the collection, or an anthology with other writers’ work, so it is quicker to search for the collection’s title first. A few stories are also listed as books of their own, but not all of them.

These are the five collections, in order of publication:

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894)
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905)
• His Last Bow (1917)
• The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)

The second novel is listed on Project Gutenberg as The Sign of the Four. It is often called The Sign of Four, so keep both titles in mind. The last collection, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, was added in January 2023, when it entered the public domain in the United States. I wrote about Project Gutenberg and copyright in What Is Project Gutenberg?.

Reading Holmes in ABC George

I make ABC George, a free reading app for iPhone and iPad that holds the Project Gutenberg catalogue of English books. All four Holmes novels and all five collections are in the catalogue, and they sit on the Detective shelf of the Discover screen. Search works by title and author, without a connection. Search for “Sherlock” or “Doyle” rather than a story’s title.

Books are divided into chapters, so once a collection is open you can pick the story you want from Chapters on the reading screen. While reading, long-press a word and tap Look up to see a plain-English definition and the WordNet senses. For a word with several meanings, such as engaged, look through the senses for the one that fits the sentence.

There are no ads and no account, and books read offline once downloaded. Books to read after Holmes are in 30 Free Classic Books for English Learners, and how far your vocabulary will take you is in How Many English Words Do You Need to Read a Novel?.