The Baker Street Classics Sherlock Holmes collection is a retro-inspired full set of Arthur Conan Doyle’s wonderful tales of the inimitable ‘consulting detective’ at work. All the ingredients of the friendship between Holmes and Watson which permeate the later stories can be found in this opening adventure it is no surprise that once launched upon the reading public, Holmes and Watson continued their collaboration for another thirty years.

Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard asks for help in solving what he describes as ‘a puzzler’: a man has been discovered dead, surrounded by blood-but with no wounds upon him.įirst appearing in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, A Study in Scarlet marked the start of one of the most iconic partnerships in literature. The two young men agree to share lodgings at 221B Baker Street, and it is not long before Holmes’s faculties are put to a more practical use. When Dr Watson meets Sherlock Holmes for the first time the ‘consulting detective’ immediately demonstrates his inimitable powers of observation, deducing that the doctor has returned to convalesce from a wound received during military service in Afghanistan.

‘On his rigid face there stood an expression of horror such as I have never seen upon human features’

A study in scarlet book cover