📚 The Complete Canon
All sixty Sherlock Holmes stories — four novels and fifty-six adventures, every one in the public domain. Each page summarises the case, names the reasoning techniques on display, and points to the tools and games where you can practise them yourself.
The Four Novels 1887–1915
A Study in Scarlet
1887
Watson meets Holmes, and a corpse in an empty Brixton house — RACHE scrawled in blood — opens the first case: a revenge trail reaching back to Utah.
The Sign of the Four
1890
Mary Morstan's yearly pearls lead to a stolen Agra treasure, a one-legged man, and Toby the bloodhound racing across London by scent.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
1902
A spectral hound curses the Baskervilles on Dartmoor; Holmes strips the supernatural down to phosphorus, footprints, and a very human heir.
The Valley of Fear
1915
A ciphered warning arrives too late for the man at Birlstone Manor — but the body with the shotgun face is not what it seems, and Moriarty's shadow is on the case.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 1892
A Scandal in Bohemia
1891
The King of Bohemia needs a photograph back from Irene Adler; Holmes's stagecraft meets its match, and she becomes the woman.
The Red-Headed League
1891
A pawnbroker is paid to copy the encyclopaedia because of his red hair — a distraction exactly as absurd as the tunnel being dug beneath his shop.
A Case of Identity
1891
A vanished bridegroom, a typewritten courtship, and a stepfather's income — solved from a typewriter's worn letters.
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
1891
A son stands over his murdered father, and the dying word "rat" points to Ballarat — footprints and a grey cloak clear the obvious suspect.
The Five Orange Pips
1891
Envelopes of orange pips precede deaths in the Openshaw family; Holmes traces the K.K.K. to a ship's sailing dates — chronology as a weapon.
The Man with the Twisted Lip
1891
A respectable gentleman vanishes into an opium den and a beggar is charged with his murder — until a sponge solves the case.
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
1892
A Christmas goose swallows a stolen gem; a battered hat tells Holmes its owner's whole domestic history before the trail leads to Covent Garden.
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
1892
A locked room, a whistle in the night, a bell-rope that rings no bell — and a swamp adder descending it. The classic impossible-room elimination.
The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb
1892
A hydraulic engineer loses a thumb and nearly his life in a press used for coining; carriage distances betray the house that burned.
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
1892
A bride vanishes from her own wedding breakfast; a dropped bouquet and a hotel bill reveal a prior marriage very much alive.
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
1892
A banker's son is caught holding a broken coronet; footprints in snow and a naked-footed accomplice prove devotion, not theft.
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
1892
A governess is paid too well to cut her hair and sit in a window; she is a living decoy for an imprisoned daughter.
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes 1893
Silver Blaze
1892
A Derby favourite vanishes and its trainer dies on the moor; the dog that did nothing in the night-time tells Holmes who led the horse away.
The Yellow Face
1893
At Norbury, a wife's secret visits to a masked figure look like blackmail; Holmes guesses wrong, and the truth is kinder than his theory — whenever he grows over-confident, he asks Watson to whisper "Norbury".
The Stockbroker's Clerk
1893
A too-generous job offer keeps a clerk away from the office where his double is cracking the safe — the Red-Headed League's trick, refined.
The "Gloria Scott"
1893
Holmes's first case: a message about fly-paper and hen-pheasants that reads harmless — until every third word is taken, and an old convict ship surfaces.
The Musgrave Ritual
1893
A nonsense family catechism is really a treasure map of shadows and paces; the butler who solved it first lies under a flagstone with the crown of the Stuarts.
The Reigate Squires
1893
A torn note in two hands convicts a father and son; Holmes, convalescing, fakes a collapse to snatch the evidence — handwriting analysis at its purest.
The Crooked Man
1893
A colonel dies of terror in a locked room with a mongoose's tracks on the floor; the crooked man he betrayed decades ago had only to be seen.
The Resident Patient
1893
A doctor's benefactor is found hanged in a staged suicide; cigar ends and footprints count the executioners on the stair.
The Greek Interpreter
1893
Mycroft makes his debut as an interpreter is forced to negotiate with a starved prisoner through sticking-plaster and lies.
The Naval Treaty
1893
A secret treaty vanishes from a Whitehall desk while the bell-rope is still swinging; the thief was always closer to home than the clerk dared think.
The Final Problem
1893
Moriarty's web closes; Holmes trades London for the Alps and, above the Reichenbach falls, the world loses its best and wisest man — for a while.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes 1905
The Adventure of the Empty House
1903
Holmes returns from the dead with a wax bust in the window and Colonel Moran's air-gun in the dark — the great hiatus ends with a snap of handcuffs.
The Adventure of the Norwood Builder
1903
A young solicitor inherits from a client found burned the same night; a thumbprint that appears overnight proves too much, and a smoke-out finds the living corpse.
The Adventure of the Dancing Men
1903
Chalked stick-figures terrorise a Norfolk wife; Holmes breaks the substitution cipher by letter frequency — and answers in the same dancing hand.
The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
1903
A music teacher is shadowed on her weekly ride by a bearded cyclist; the chaperone is the danger, and a forced wedding ends at gunpoint.
The Adventure of the Priory School
1904
A duke's son vanishes from school; cattle tracks that walk like horseshoes and a dead German master unravel a kidnapping close to the blood.
The Adventure of Black Peter
1904
A harpooned sea-captain and a sealskin tobacco pouch; Holmes spends a morning failing to spear a pig carcass and thereby frees an innocent man.
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
1904
The king of blackmailers meets a masked visitor Holmes declines to identify; for once the detective burgles, watches, and holds his tongue.
The Adventure of the Six Napoleons
1904
Someone is smashing plaster busts of Napoleon across London; the sixth holds the black pearl of the Borgias — pattern, not madness.
The Adventure of the Three Students
1904
Exam proofs are copied in a don's rooms; pencil shavings, a scratch, and three heights of student narrow to the athlete who jumped.
The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez
1904
A dying secretary clutches a woman's glasses; Holmes reads their owner's face and habits from the lenses, then smokes her out of a bookcase.
The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
1904
Cambridge's star player vanishes before the big match; a dripping drag-hound named Pompey leads to a cottage, a secret wife, and grief.
The Adventure of the Abbey Grange
1904
Burglars supposedly kill Sir Eustace with a poker, but three wine glasses tell another story; Holmes convenes his own jury of one — Watson — and acquits.
The Adventure of the Second Stain
1904
A statesman's letter could mean war; a bloodstain that moved and a floor that didn't put the document back where it started.
His Last Bow 1917
The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge
1908
A host vanishes overnight with his whole household; voodoo relics and a watching face in the window guard a plot against a Central American tyrant.
The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
1893
Two severed ears in salt arrive by post at the wrong sister's house; ear anatomy — a Holmes monograph subject — names the family.
The Adventure of the Red Circle
1911
A lodger who never shows a face communicates by candle flashes; Holmes reads the window code and walks into a secret-society vendetta.
The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans
1908
A junior clerk lies dead by the Underground with submarine plans in his pocket; points, not platforms, tell Holmes the body rode the roof of a train.
The Adventure of the Dying Detective
1913
Holmes starves himself yellow to play dying bait for a planter with a poisoned ivory box and a nephew's grave on his conscience.
The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax
1911
A pious spinster vanishes with her jewels; an oversized coffin, ordered deep, nearly buries her alive with a legitimate corpse.
The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
1910
Two brothers mad and a sister dead around an untouched card table; Holmes tests the lamp-burned powder on himself and Watson — and nearly joins the victims.
His Last Bow
1917
August 1914: an Irish-American motor expert delivers naval codes to a German spymaster — and is Sherlock Holmes, two years undercover, with an east wind coming.
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes 1927
The Adventure of the Illustrious Client
1924
A collector of women keeps a locked book of his conquests; vitriol settles what evidence could not, and Holmes burgles for the book that breaks the spell.
The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier
1926
Holmes narrates for once: a soldier glimpsed chalk-white at a window is thought a leper — elimination and a dermatologist restore him to the living.
The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone
1921
A crown diamond, a wax dummy in the window again, and a gramophone playing violin: the thieves hand Holmes the stone while talking themselves into prison.
The Adventure of the Three Gables
1926
A widow is offered a fortune for her house and everything in it — because her dead son's manuscript, a roman-à-clef, is inside.
The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire
1924
A mother caught sucking blood from her baby's neck; the vampire is a loving woman drawing poison, and the monster is a jealous boy with a South American bow.
The Adventure of the Three Garridebs
1924
An American promises fortunes to anyone named Garrideb — another absurd pretext to empty a house; Watson takes a bullet and sees behind Holmes's mask.
The Problem of Thor Bridge
1922
A governess seems damned by a pistol in her wardrobe; a chip on the bridge's parapet and a stone-weighted string prove a suicide built to hang her.
The Adventure of the Creeping Man
1923
A professor climbs ivy by night and his own dog attacks him; nine-day cycles and a serum from langur monkeys explain the crawling — science gone vain.
The Adventure of the Lion's Mane
1926
In retirement by the Channel, Holmes faces a death by flogging with no assailant — the murderer is Cyanea capillata, a jellyfish, and the clue was in a book.
The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger
1927
No mystery to solve — only a confession to hear: a circus wife, a lion, a mauled face, and Holmes talking a ruined woman out of suicide.
The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place
1927
A ruined baronet's sister stops seeing her own dog — because she is dead in the crypt and a debt rides on her horse's Derby; the spaniel knows first.
The Adventure of the Retired Colourman
1926
A miser's young wife elopes with his chess partner — into a sealed strong-room smelling of paint; the smell, and a ticket stub, hang him.
Texts are hosted by Project Gutenberg — every story page links to its free, legal, public-domain edition.