A lifelong Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle fan, he was inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars group in 2002. If I have any talent at all as a writer, it lies in conveying real enthusiasm about the authors I love. Above all, with its abundant annotation, the book offers a good survey of Conan Doyle’s career and some of his many interests. Michael Dirda – Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, writer and lifelong Sherlockian – gives us his personal choice of the best Sherlock Holmes books and tells us more about their creator. Being an invested member of the group is a lot of fun, especially since my fellow Irregulars range from the retired chief technical officer for Apple to judges and lawyers and notable writers such as Neil Gaiman. The Best of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twenty of the very best tales from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fifty-six short stories featuring the arch-sleuth.

I naturally touch on the many films and stage plays and pastiches that employ the great detective. A Study in Scarlet

Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. Although the new stories of Sherlock are good, nothing beats the originals. You can't just put the book down for a bathroom-break, Glad to say that the number of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fans was increased by one half-insane book lover - that would be me :P. Not only his stories were so good : full of scenes that made me forget to breathe and anxiously skim to know what was gonna happen next , but also the writing prose of Sir Arthur was rather pleasant to read .

She always insisted “the Game” should be played without cracking a smile.

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It’s described as a locked room mystery – what is that?


I love Sherlock Holmes and I've watched nearly every one of the tv adaptions of the well-known detective and his friend, so it was time for me to pick up the original. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. I drew on the letters, of course, but also his essays and memoirs, the Sherlockian scholarship of the Baker Street Irregulars, various biographies. There's some adaptations that should take note. One of the aims of my little book On Conan Doyle is to urge people to explore Conan Doyle’s many wonderful non-Sherlockian works. The Baker Street Irregulars was founded in the 1930s by three brothers – Christopher Morley, who was a well-known literary journalist of the time, his brother Felix Morley, who was for a while the editor of my newspaper, The Washington Post, and their brother Frank Morley, who worked in publishing and once shared an office at Faber & Faber with that other great Sherlock Holmes fan, TS Eliot. It is really hard to find a good straight man, and Watson is one of the best. It has a superbly eerie atmosphere and it gives you all kinds of details about Sherlock Holmes and Watson.

It introduces Professor George Edward Challenger, a self-important but wonderfully funny and committed scientist who discovers a plateau in a South American jungle where dinosaurs still roam the earth.

I haven’t read a lot of mystery genre so this was a fun little diversion from my usual reads. The Baker Street Irregulars continues to flourish, hosting an annual birthday banquet with lots of toasts and talks. You know that he killed off the detective at the end of the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and people thought for several years that their beloved Sherlock was dead after the tumble with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. As a story, everything in it comes together perfectly. I have been reading this book since the beginning of the year. Liked it a lot. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

I'm a big fan of the Sherlock series and films so reading the source was just great. Next up in this list of the best Sherlock Holmes books is the short story, The Adventure of the Speckled Band.

It was also entertaining to observe and recognise all of the events and details that had more or less been adapted into the television programme - actually, much more than I had anticipated was derived from the ACD stories. They decided to run a contest in the Saturday Review of Literature for people who had the same kind of passionate interest in 221b Baker Street, and from this contest there emerged a kind of literary society and dining club, which has being going strong for more than 75 years now. How was the crime committed? He has these rather swashbuckling tall tales told by a Napoleonic cavalryman, Brigadier Gerard. We publish at least two new interviews per week.