Recommended Reading

If you have never read a Sherlock Holmes story from the original Canon (being the 60 stories written by A. C. Doyle), I suggest you close your web browser, turn off your computer, and read the following stories first. Then, please return to this page.

1. A Study In Scarlet
2. The Red-headed League
3. The Adventure of the Speckled Band
4. The Musgrave Ritual
5. The Final Problem
6. The Empty House
7. The Hound of the Baskervilles

I recommend William Baring-Gould's The Annotated Sherlock Holmes as your one-stop Holmes canon source. It is chocked full of essays, explainations, and all 60 stories in chronological order, complete with footnotes and illustrations. And no coffee table should be without a nice leather-bound edition of the collected stories, so perhaps some of the more recent publications of the complete works would do nicely, such as the Barnes&Noble edition.

Now then, with that out of the way, please feel free to look over this list of extra-Canon books for more information on the Sherlockian phenomena. Of course, you will want to finish the remaining 53 stories at some time in the future, but those should at least give you enough of an introduction to the character and methods of Holmes and Dr. Watson.

• The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana, by Jack Tracy. Reference on locations, characters, and stories. Available in hardback and paperback.
• The Game Is Afoot: Parodies, Pastiches, and Ponderings of Sherlock Holmes, by Marvin Kaye (Editor)

Michael Sherman msherman@221bakerstreet.org Last updated 11.18.00