The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1894, is the second collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. It contains eleven stories, including Silver Blaze, The Yellow Face, The Stockbroker's Clerk, The Gloria Scott, The Musgrave Ritual, The Reigate Squire, The Crooked Man, The Resident Patient, The Greek Interpreter — and most famously, The Final Problem. In that last story, Holmes encounters Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, and the two men fall together from the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland on 4 May 1891. Conan Doyle believed he was killing Holmes for good; twenty thousand readers immediately cancelled their Strand Magazine subscriptions.

The Memoirs also introduces Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock's brilliantly indolent elder brother, and reveals more of Holmes's origins and methods than any previous collection. The Greek Interpreter is the first story in which Holmes and Watson encounter Mycroft, and the Musgrave Ritual takes us back to Holmes's earliest case as a consulting detective. These stories deepen the mythology of the world's most famous detective in ways that still resonate more than 130 years later.

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