A young doctor back from Afghanistan takes rooms with a man who can tell where he has been by the tan line on his wrist, and for a year says nothing about it in print. Then, in the summer of 1891, he starts publishing the cases one a month, and a magazine that had been selling well begins selling out.
These are the twelve that made the name. A king of Bohemia comes up the stairs in a mask and leaves having been beaten by a woman who is always, afterward, the woman. A pawnbroker is paid four pounds a week to copy an encyclopaedia in an empty office, and the question is not who is paying him but why they want him out of his shop between ten and two. A dead man says one word beside his father's body and it is the word that hangs him until somebody thinks about what it might have sounded like. Five dried orange pips arrive in an envelope from Pondicherry and the man who opens it has seven weeks to live.
Doyle is not interested in the puzzle for its own sake. He is interested in the moment a client stops lying, in the ash on a carpet, in what a respectable house looks like from the inside at three in the morning. The solutions are fair and the clues are all on the page, but what has kept these twelve in print for a hundred and thirty years is the room in Baker Street: two men, a fire, a caller on the stair, and the flat certainty that whatever walks in can be taken apart.
The complete 1892 George Newnes collection, entire and in its own order, including the three parts of A Scandal in Bohemia, set for reading rather than for reference.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 284 pages, set in EB Garamond and printed on 60# cream stock. Complete and unabridged.
Hardcover: casewrap edition, built for the shelf and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
