Conan Doyle had attempted to bring his Sherlock Holmes stories to a fitting close in 1893 with “The Final Problem” but public outrage both persuaded and in some senses forced him to resurrect his famous detective.

It was therefore not through a dramatic struggle with the evil Professor Moriarty atop an Alpine waterfall that Holmes was to leave the literary world, but instead he was to bow out gracefully and patriotically in the series of stories published in 1917 under the title “His Last Bow”.

These short stories are as full as ever of the author’s imaginative skill in providing puzzles and conundrums for his creation. Within these tales Holmes at last meets an official detective who comes a little closer to employing his acute methods of reasoning. There is a story of crazed jealousy which produces a grisly souvenir of the crime. Holmes and Watson encounter in the streets of London a Mafia like organization intent on revenge and in the wilds of Cornwall revenge of a different kind in connection with a horrific and macabre murder.

The final story places Holmes in the very specific time frame of the First World War, persuaded out of retirement and calling once again upon his old and trusted friend Watson, to capture an enemy spy.

Classics