After Sherlock Holmes "died" in 1893 at the Reichenbach Falls at the end of the story "The Final Problem," Arthur Conan Doyle was inundated with pleas from fans around the world to revive him. Doyle resisted for nearly eight years before publishing The Hound of the Baskervilles, a reminiscence set two years before Holmes's fatal fall. Only in 1903 was Sherlock Holmes "resurrected" in his first new short story in ten years, "The Adventure of the Empty House." But Holmes has changed.

The Holmes who now scours the streets of London and tramps across the English countryside is as keenly observant and nimble of mind as ever, but his patience with British justice is wearing thin. At times he takes the law into his own hands. At other times, he knowingly breaks the law. And, on one memorable occasion, he acts very unlike the gentleman we know him to be. What can have happened to produce such uncharacteristic behavior in the world's greatest detective?

Although, like all of Holmes's adventures, these stories are set in the late Victorian era, they were written in the twentieth century. Included in this volume are the fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, and the thirty-three stories comprising The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow, and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.