I want to read Sherlock Holmes

One

One

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Soldato
Joined
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Are there any nice box sets out there and, perhaps more importantly, is there a cheap way of getting hold of the first book (just to see if I get on with the writing style)?
 
If I am not mistaken, it's free in Kindle Bookstore if you don't mind an electronic copy
 
Big Sherlock Holmes fan here. You're are lucky in that Holmes books are usually free or very cheap on Kindle.

The first Holmes story was A Study in Scarlet and is longer than the usual Holmes adventures, bar the longer stories such as The Sign of Four and the most famous of all, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The book can bought on kindle for 77p. I recommend The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Illustrated) (Top Five Classics) for the first 12 adventures. The Baskervilles is also available for 77p.

If you want print, then I recommend Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories (Wordsworth Special Editions). It's about a fiver.

Holmes stories are very easy to read. Some people assume the language is going to be typical of the era and not as fluent and easy to understand as today's literature. However, Conan-Doyle seemed to write slightly ahead of his time and the stories flow freely with no complicated flows or language at all. I think that's one of the reasons they became so popular in the early 20th century.

Deffo read the Baskervilles. The book is so much better than all the film versions I've seen.
 
I just read the first chapter of a Study in Scarlet and I have to say I was very surprised by the language. As you say it's not consistent with my expectations of that era and was in fact very readable.

Amazon seem to do a nice 6 book box-set for just a smidgen under £30. Waterstones are selling that Wordsworth edition with it all in one. I may pay a visit to see what the quality is like. It appears to be in a non-chronological order (not sure if that's correct or not)?
 
I don't think that it matters hugely if you read them out of order, there's the occasional reference to previous cases but there's usually enough context to allow you to get the point of the reference irrespective of that. Each story is basically self-contained and that is deliberate because they were in various magazines of the day so not everyone could or would keep all the stories together to read them.

One thing to bear in mind if you're going to buy an all in one edition is that it's a pretty weighty tome, several hundred pages long and will be a bit unwieldy to carry around if that was your aim. Fantastic stories to read though and very easy to get through.
 
The Complete Sherlock Holmes is usually quite cheap to buy and contains all the stories in the correct order. It is incredibly easy to read, and is something I'd recommend to anyone.
 
Bear in mind the stories were written to be published in The Strand magazine which was not intended for the literati but for the common man. Also, remember that Conan Doyle hated Holmes - he wanted to be taken seriously as a writer but the rest of this stuff just wasn't very good - which was why he killed Holmes off. But with no other money coming in he had to resurrect Holmes to pay his bills.

I have an edition of the complete works which replicates the way the stories appeared in The Strand in two columns per page.
 
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