The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes gathers twelve short cases narrated by Dr. Watson, who reunites with the great detective at his Baker Street lodgings and chronicles his work. The collection opens with "A Scandal in Bohemia," where Holmes is outwitted by Irene Adler, and ranges across blackmail, disguise, stolen jewels, vanished spouses, and a vivid gallery of clients and villains. In each, Holmes turns scraps of observation—mud on a boot, a smell of iodoform—into startling deductions that solve mysteries the police have abandoned as hopeless.
The stories celebrate reason as a kind of art, dramatizing how patient observation and logic can illuminate human motive and wrongdoing. Beneath the puzzles run themes of justice beyond the law, the theatre of Victorian London, and the deep friendship between a brilliant, restless mind and his steadfast companion. The book matters because it defined the modern detective story and made Holmes an enduring icon of cool intelligence.
How it begins
T o Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory. I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.