Despite the fact that I was able to sort of predict the outcomes of the mysteries by the end of the book (after fifty-some stories, you can't help noticing patterns), I really enjoyed each of them. The book contains two short novels and thirty five short stories, and they're all pretty interesting. I liked the short stories a lot because each of them was a complete mystery, but I could finish one in about fifteen minutes. Looking forward to reading volume two!
Best quote in the entire novel: "'Lie number one,' said the old man; 'I never saw either of them until two months ago, and I have never been in Africa in my life, so you can put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Busybody Holmes!'"

I really liked the stories and I like having the knowledge
However, I hated the format! This was volume one of two in a box set yet the book was still so large it killed my hands and wouldn't fit into any of my purses. It would not have been difficult to make this set 3 or even 4 books. The story and author are amazing, the publishers need to rethink their process.

I have got the book of the same front cover which takes you back in old times.
Also, this was my first ever novel that I had bought.
This book takes you from relaxing in your house to chilling spine in old London time.
This book is already famous and what's more to say about it !!!
Love, thriller, and despair. This book gives you everything that a reader would ever want.

Simply superb writing!

I've reviewed the five individual books in this volume at their respective pages. Over all, I'm really enjoying reading the original Sherlock Holmes canon. The stories vary in quality to an extent, but they're all fairly good adventures, and they tend to have clever plots. Around a third to half the time I can guess what the solution will be, but that's mostly because I'm either familiar with adaptations or because I know mystery tropes well enough. The introduction to this edition is a defense of Watson, which is nice, since pop culture depicts him as a bumbler far too often. My only complaint is that the way the books are divided between the two volumes is odd. I would have preferred to end on Memoirs, leaving Sherlock Holmes' death as a cliffhanger for volume two. Also, although Hound of the Baskervilles comes before Return, it's held back for the second volume for some reason. Still, this is a pretty nice collection, and I've had a lot of fun reading it. I look forward to starting Volume II soon.

The stories in this collection are truly timeless. I admire Doyle's spare and precise way of moving a story forward, at the same time as allowing Watson to humanize the scientific narrative. I can say that these stories are required reading for all mystery readers and are not in the least overrated. Thoroughly readable, quick and and elegant.

Embarrassed that it took me this long to get round to reading any Sherlock Holmes, but so glad I did. It's stating the obvious that in Holmes, Doyle created one of the literary world's most memorable and multi-faceted characters, but the ingenious story-telling is equally as memorable. If you're yet to read, forget any screen portrayals, deerstalkers and pipes and read these wonderfully-crafted adventures with no preconceptions, and let yourself be whisked away to a simpler time of horse-drawn cabs, swirling fog, and chilly cobbled streets.

I love Sherlock and Watson’s chemistry, it’s so wonderful to read. It’s making me want to rewatch Sherlock (bbc)!
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I don’t know how to write a proper review for this so instead I’ll just write down my favorite stories of this volume. (Order as in the contents of the volume):

1. A Scandal in Bohemia.
2. A Case of Identity.
3. The Man with the Twisted Lip
4. The Adventure of the Speckled Band.
5. The Yellow Face.
6. The Final Problem.
7. The Adventure of the Empty House.
8. The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milveryon.

I can definitely see myself rereading it in the future! Also I have to say that listening to Greg Wagland reading it (on YouTube) has add to the experience!

Finally  completed Sherlock Holmes volume one book.. as we  know that the basic of all the stories in this book are the same that a mystery happens and the local police or the person related to that mystery seeks the help of Sherlock..our hero scoops in does some genius investigation that we won't understand until Sherlock himself tells what he had done and finally the mystery is solved..But the interesting part is none of the stories are similar to each and other. There are like more then 20 stories in this book and all has its own uniqueness .. All have different type investigation and different methods of solving the issue. The best part is each and every stories make you to cling the book tightly in your hands until the end.. Unquiness is the speciality of this book.

Like all the reader when I started to read this book I entered Baker Street eventually into 221B. I took the Character of Watson during my reading inorder to understand Sherlock more...

Sherlock Holmes is combination of a private investigator..a forensic expert ..a genius chemist etc etc.. and also sometimes when he disappears and appears suddenly I get a feeling that he may also be a ghost..

I changelled myself against Sherlock to find the solution for the mystery but everytime I ended up failing to solve the mystery and ultimately getting fascinated by the way Sherlock solves it..It's classic literature. It's enjoyable to read not just for the stories contained within, but because of the tone and way its written..

Thank Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for this great book.. Happy reading..

I haven't read all of these, but most of them are pretty good.

Wow. Wow. I have to write a review about a book that contains no less than 1059 pages of Holmes-y goodness. What do I do? Where do I even start? Should I quote the "brain-attic" line from A Study In Scarlet? Or tell you, in case you don't know, that Watson is amazing too? Or rant about how no movie is ever going to get the true character of Holmes across to you, you're just going to have to read these books and see for yourself?

Well, first I think I'll tell you how I got the book. Always a good start. My mom read The Hound of the Baskervilles and loved it, loved it so much that on our next bookstore run she bought both paperback volumes of The Complete Sherlock Holmes and read them every chance she got.
Needless to say, I had to keep up. I loved Holmes too, even though I'd only read the first two novels and the odd short story. So I just picked it up and started it from the beginning. I read everything in order…or so I thought, because Sherlock Holmes is a hard thing to read in order. Watson, our loyal storyteller, jumps back and forth constantly using a basic timeline of "before my marriage/after my marriage". (His marriage happens directly after the events of the second novel, before all the short stories even take place, so needless to say there's a lot of skipping around.) Not to mention that the book packagers make things confusing for a purist by putting the individual volumes slightly out of their publishing order at times (more about that when I review Volume II--anyway, it's not something you'd even notice if you didn't read the publication dates.)

Well, first of all I think A Study In Scarlet is the best beginning ever written. It starts off Holmes with a bang (and an amazing title: "Why not use a little art jargon," says Holmes.) He's apparently been detecting for a long time at this point, but we don't see anything until our set of eyes--in the form of Dr. John Watson--move into 221B Baker Street with him. Not to say that Watson is merely the reader himself. If you're used to thinking of him as a stodgy straight man who lives to make Holmes look cooler by comparison, you might be slightly jarred by the first two pages, which tell us all about all the heart-pounding experiences he's gone through in the war before he even encounters Sherlock Holmes. It's exactly the kind of thing a screenwriter would have invented for the new movie just to let the viewers know that Watson is Different from How You Thought He Was (and he's handy with a gun, too).

There's a lot of irony going on when Watson and Holmes agree to move in together and split the rent, especially when Watson, as the narrator, expresses his relief that he can finally settle down and live a nice, quiet existence. Um, Watson? Your life of adventure's barely even happened yet, dude. Volume I has 1059 pages, and you're on, what, page seven?

But still subtler and more delicious is the moment when the guy who sets Holmes and Watson up (he only makes that one appearance, but he's probably one of the most important characters in all of literature) tells Watson that this might not be a good idea. After all, Holmes is creepy. He knows things he's not supposed to know, he studies dead bodies and nobody knows why, and he'd probably feed a friend poison just to see what would happen. Watson responds by saying that, no, actually, this is great, because I love a good mystery. He spends the whole second chapter playing detective, trying to figure out who and what this mysterious Sherlock Holmes is (the list he makes entitled "Sherlock Holmes - His Limits" is not to be missed). And in the modern world, we all know already that Holmes is the one who's the detective--the greatest detective of all time, no less. That bit of irony ripened with age.

There's so much greatness in that one first book--the humanity of Watson contrasted with the near-inhumanity of Holmes for the first time, Sherlock Holmes just being Sherlock Holmes (if you've never actually read the stories you'll probably find yourself gaping like Watson too), the billions of potshots taken at the "official" detectives Gregson and Lestrade, the fact that the book can even manage to drift away from its characters for five chapter's worth of the murderer's backstory without losing an ounce of suspense…well, my mother said it best: "He [Arthur Conan Doyle] was already on the top of his game."
And, contrary to what some critics will tell you (the self-same critics who diss Watson as a dull straight man, no doubt), he never came down from it. Maybe not every single short story is my favorite, but bottom line, Arthur Conan Doyle picked up that scarlet thread of mystery from the first book and dragged it, spun it out over story after story, with Holmes and Watson hot after it like "a pair of old hounds", as Holmes refers to the two of them, years later when they've grown comfortable and natural and Watson no longer tries to politely leave the room when Holmes' clients walk in. (Holmes always insists that he stay around and never scorns his intelligence for a second, even if he does mock Watson's writing at times, his main problem with it being that it should be less romantic and more like "a series of lectures". Watson, for his part, insists that the romance and the facts are part and parcel and there's no way to separate them, and I'm sure that the author agreed.)

Another interesting thing about these stories is that, behind the thick layer of amazing characterizations and brilliantly thought-out mysteries, the author isn't hard to see. Arthur Conan Doyle--who seems to have based Watson largely on himself, having served in the army and later been a doctor who ditched his practice to write down the stories--had trouble keeping up sometimes with the demand for Holmes, and frequently tried to wrap everything up, to no avail. People wanted more, and during his periods of writing they could read his short stories as they were published in The Strand magazine. Why so short, and so many? Well, my mom realized it herself after reading them all--they're just like a TV series before TV. Each mystery is its own episode, but there was only one writer, and when they wanted more episodes he just had to make more of them, that was all. Standout episodes include A Scandal in Bohemia (the only appearance of Irene Adler--and no, she's not Holmes' love interest, but she's far more awesome than she'll ever be in a movie), The Adventure of the Speckled Band (Arthur Conan Doyle's favorite episode), The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (the Christmas special!), The Yellow Face (the touching story with Watson as a deeply moved witness), The Gloria Scott and The Musgrave Ritual (a kind of two-parter exploring Holmes' pre-Watson days), The Final Problem (the series finale…or is it?), The Adventure of the Empty House (yes, another season!) The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton (which would have been amazing and chilling even if the plot hadn't involved Holmes and Watson playing criminal--for a good cause, of course), The Adventure of the Abbey Grange (wherein Holmes utters his famous line, "The game is afoot") and The Adventure of the Second Stain (Holmes' greatest case of all, and Watson insists that he isn't allowed to write any more, but I'll say it again--hang on, Watson, this is only Volume I!) For a devoted fan, this volume and the one after it are just like a nice set of "Complete Series" DVDs. Honestly, I should have stopped and read the mysteries more slowly, but I'll have plenty of time to do that when Volume II is finished and I'm craving Holmes again.

I read the stories dreading the awful moment when I'd know that Arthur Conan Doyle was getting sick of his character, but I never got that feeling. Honestly, I think he loved to write about Holmes--you can't help but feel the joy bubbling up from his pen, even and especially in some of the later stories. Perhaps he was just worried that he'd lose his ability to write a good mystery, which he never did. You can see his planning at work--after he's run out of plausible excuses to have Watson somehow get involved in mysteries with Holmes, he starts flashing back to the mysteries that happened before Watson got married, and when he brings Holmes back after his "death" at Reichenbacher there's just the whisper of a hint that Watson suffered a real "bereavement" as well. From thereon in, Watson's living back in the rooms on Baker Street. Blink and you'll miss it, but if you have "a genius for minutae" you might figure out what it's supposed to mean--Watson's beloved wife is dead. It's heartbreaking for Watson, but for the author it's a convenient plot device. From here, the stories can flow thick and fast.

Well, it's getting late, and I've got to wrap this up and go to the opera in a hansom cab (just kidding--I wish!) so I'll just write one last observation. This DVD in book form also contains a featurette, the introduction, "On the Significance of Boswells." (Holmes once affectionately referred to Watson as 'my Boswell,' in reference to a well-known biographer of the time.) In a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek and brilliant way, it points out that the stories would be nothing without Watson, but it's full of spoilers, so it's probably best to save it for after you've downed both volumes, or at least the stories mentioned. I'll just interject a little of my own opinion. Those who see Watson as a commoner, someone who Holmes is a critique of, are missing the point. Watson is a critique of Holmes. Holmes may be the perfect mystery-solving machine, but Watson can love, he can lead a life outside of these mysteries and, unlike Holmes, he doesn't have to sit around injecting himself with cocaine during periods of low criminal activity just because the boredom is eating him alive. Holmes is an insane genius, but he's flawed, and Watson is a perfectly normal, intelligent, complete person. I'm not saying that either character is better. They're equally brilliant characters, and if I went all literary-critic and started insulting one of them the other would surely rise up to defend him. As the introduction most rightly says, "Literature never introduced a more symbiotic relationship, or a warmer and more timeless friendship."

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - 3/5
A set of fairly ordinary short mysteries. I think I am more captivated by well-constructed murder mysteries than those that merely pose a head-scratching riddle because of the whodunit aspect of the former. My favorite story from this collection was "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" and my least favorite was "A Case of Identity."

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - 3/5
I have realized that I like mysteries wherein multiple culprit candidates exist, and the motives for the crime are contained within the timeline of the story, apparent to the reader. Some of the cases in this anthology had crimes whose motives predate the story timeline by decades, and the reader has no way of knowing/anticipating them save when the narrator reveals them to us.
Also, the whole series would have been richer, I think, if Moriarty’s sinister presence was conveyed to the reader on and off, like a dark shadow looming behind everything. Instead, he was just introduced in "The Final Problem", and the reader is supposed to accept that he controls more than half the crimes in England.
My favorites from this collection were "The Musgrave Ritual" and "The Naval Treaty". My least favorite was "The Yellow Face".

The Return of Sherlock Homes - 3/5
My favorite cases from this anthology are "The Adenture of the Six Napoleons", "The Aventure of the Golden Pince-Nez", and "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange."
The most disappointing case was "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter."