Sherlock Holmes & Conan Doyle
Holmes in publication order, with the Challenger stories alongside. Gaboriau's Lecoq, a detective Holmes insults by name, gets the last word.
- You get the first meeting of observant, irritating Sherlock Holmes and war-weary Dr. Watson, with Holmes showing off through tiny physical clues and chemical experiments. The mystery is briskly atmospheric, though its sudden shift into a long historical backstory feels strange; you read it for the partnership taking shape.
- Twelve short cases you can dip into anywhere, and half the pleasure is Watson's patient bafflement while Holmes notices the scuffed boot or the dog that didn't bark. Cozy in the best way, though don't expect deep character arcs, just clever puzzles and fog.
- You get Holmes at his most inventive here, from the vanished racehorse in “Silver Blaze” to the eerie family history of “The Musgrave Ritual,” with Watson’s steady affection keeping the eccentricity human. A few stories feel more like clever puzzles than emotional dramas, but the collection is wonderfully varied and easy to dip into.
- Doyle sends Watson off alone to a fog-soaked moor with a family curse and something howling in the dark, and it's genuinely eerie, not cozy. Holmes vanishes for long stretches, which somehow makes it better.
- Holmes comes back from the dead in the first story, and Watson faints, which tells you everything about how much fun Doyle is having. The cases here are some of his cleverest (the dancing stick figures, the smashed Napoleon busts), easy to read one at a time before bed.
- Professor Challenger alone is worth it, a bearded egomaniac who throws a journalist down the stairs before agreeing to take him to a South American plateau where dinosaurs still roam. Pure boys'-own adventure, cheerfully implausible and very funny, if you're happy to switch your brain to holiday mode.
- Sherlock's grandfather is Dupin, the armchair reasoner of 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' collected here. Holmes sneers at him by name in A Study in Scarlet; the insult is the confession.
- Lecoq is the other detective Holmes waves away in his first case. Gaboriau's French police procedural is the raw material Doyle sharpened into pure deduction.