Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. Now, I won't even try to review so much material, as the stories are many and vary widely. All I can say is that I enjoyed the whole collection in general, specially the novels, but then I'm not that keen a reader of tales and short stories. I really liked the experience and I am proud of this accomplishment. My first time to read a canon. Before reading this, I thought that the word canon only applied to biblical works. Well, that was the first thing I learned upon adding this book in my currently-reading folder.

I was also fascinated by people. And mostly people who did bad things to other people. I never understood why humanity was so cruel to each other. I wanted to learn. I wanted to fix them, I guess. I trust you have brought your passport, Watson?" he said, in lieu of greeting. "We depart for Algeria this evening. The cab will be here momentarily." Although Doyle had written other adventure series, Professor Challenger and Brigadier Gerard, he considered his true calling to be an author of Medieval Romances, with knights and so forth. I read some of them and they are quite wordy and pretty bad. The short story was Doyle’s true métier. And I say, without hesitation, if not for Holmes, Doyle would now be forgotten.The author, John Le Carre wrote in November 14, 2006, as he reviewed the 150th printing of this edition, “Dr. Watson doesn’t write to you, he talks to you, with Edwardian courtesy, across a glowing fire. His voice has no barriers or affections. It is clear, energetic and decent, the voice of a tweedy, no-nonsense colonial Britisher at ease with himself.” Looking more closely, except for the novellas, A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear, the unadapted, weaker episodes could be found in the last three volumes of the Holmes’ books. Conan Doyle's house, Undershaw, located in Hindhead, south of London, where he had lived for a decade, had been a hotel and restaurant between 1924 and 2004. It now stands empty while conservationists and Conan Doyle fans fight to preserve it.

I proceeded to read all of the unadapted stories and did not remember a one of them and found some of them quite terrible. I can say, unreservedly, nothing was lost in not adapting them. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in a classy classic manner and even if his settings were not familiar to me as a Filipino, I appreciated his stories because of the universal messages in them: love of a husband to a wife, a son to a father, a father to his child, etc; the evil in greed especially when it comes to riches and money; that men can be truly friends without homosexuality getting in-between; that we have to respect the people we work with; always be wary of the people around you; and that, if used in moderation, cocaine and morphine can actually make you sharper. I cringed while typing the last one. Holmes is, in a nutshell, single-minded in his detection. In that respect, it makes sense that all emotions, particularly love, are abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He's basically an instrument for finding out criminal stuff. I actually appreciated this, since Doyle didn't risk all the soap opera-ish entanglements that make long-running serials hard to follow without a map. He conceived each of his stories as both united by Holmes' character, and yet still potentially interesting to people who had never read any other of his stories.

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Barely glancing up from his gruesome task, he told me that it was. "You see, Watson," he continued, "there is matter that I believe may soon become illuminated not only to you but the whole of London society."