Sixty Holmes stories in nine books: the reading order, and our own story-by-story table for The Adventures and The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Short, self-contained cases are an easy way into the classics, and the one long case, The Hound of the Baskervilles, is a good second step. We read The Adventures and The Hound in full; the other seven books are covered by list only. Four out of five (draft).
Every guide comes as a video and a full written article. Pick the one you need: the review is spoiler-free, the ending explained is not.
Sherlock Holmes books in order: four novels, 56 stories, nine books, with our own table of the Adventures' twelve stories and the Hound's fifteen chapters. No spoilers.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901 to 1902) are two of the nine Sherlock Holmes books by Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote four novels and fifty six short stories about the detective. We use the free Project Gutenberg texts, ebook #1661 for the Adventures and ebook #2852 for the Hound.
Below is the reading order with the year of each book, our own table of the Adventures’ twelve stories and the Hound’s fifteen chapters, and an honest note on what we read and what we did not. No spoilers.
Short, self-contained cases are an easy way into the classics, and the one long case, The Hound of the Baskervilles, is a good second step. We read The Adventures and The Hound in full; the other seven books are covered by list only. Four out of five (draft). Read it if: you want short, complete cases you can read one at a time; you want a classic detective in plain 19th century english; you want one long case with the detective off stage for a stretch (the hound). Skip it if: you want modern pacing: the language and the period are old; you need plot guidance for the other seven books: this page covers them by list only; you want a story-time timeline of all sixty stories: we did not build one.
Publication order: A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Sign of the Four (1890), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (listed as 1894, its stories ran in The Strand to December 1893), The Hound of the Baskervilles (serialised 1901 to 1902), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), The Valley of Fear (1914 to 1915), His Last Bow (1917) and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927). Years are from Wikipedia and the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia.
Four novels and 56 short stories, sixty in all, in nine books. Wikipedia and the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia agree on the total. Editions shelve The Cardboard Box in different collections, so Memoirs has eleven or twelve stories and His Last Bow eight or seven.
Two, in the free Project Gutenberg texts: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (ebook #1661, 12 stories, about 104,000 words by our count) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (ebook #2852, 15 chapters, about 59,000 words). For the other seven books we give only titles, years and story counts.
In my reading of the Adventures, no: each of the twelve stories is a complete case told by Watson. The text does name A Study in Scarlet twice and The Sign of Four twice, so Watson is already looking back at earlier cases. Publication order is the safe default, and that is an opinion.
Not strictly. By the dates the text states, The Speckled Band is April 1883, The Five Orange Pips is September 1887, A Scandal in Bohemia (the first story) is 20 March 1888, and The Man with the Twisted Lip is June 1889. The Hound's narration names no year for its own events.
Not on stage. In chapters 6 to 11, about 44 percent of the words, the story runs through Watson's narration, two letters and a diary, and the name Holmes appears 24 times there against 191 in the whole book, by our count.
My pick, as an opinion, is The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starting with A Scandal in Bohemia, because the stories stand alone. For one long case, try The Hound of the Baskervilles.
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