Background
The twelve stories were first published in a magazine before being collected in book form. Watson’s voice makes the detective’s method part of the entertainment: readers see the clues but often learn only late how Holmes has arranged them.
Reading notes
- Pause when a clue appears and write down what it can—and cannot—prove.
- Compare the public story of a case with the private history revealed by the solution.
- Notice how Watson’s admiration can make Holmes’s certainty seem stronger than the evidence.
Version note
Text source: the Standard Ebooks EPUB edition identified on this page. This site extracted the English text and retained the source edition’s chapter order. Public-domain status must be checked for the territory where the text will be distributed.