Library / Literature & Fiction
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
- Pages
- about 312
- Category
- Literature & Fiction
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 5.7 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
In choosing a few typical cases which illustrate the remarkable
mental qualities of my friend, Sherlock Holmes, I have
endeavoured, as far as possible, to select those which presented
the minimum of sensationalism, while offering a fair field for
his talents. It is, however, unfortunately impossible entirely to
separate the sensational from the criminal, and a chronicler is
left in the dilemma that he must either sacrifice details which
are essential to his statement and so give a false impression of
the problem, or he must use matter which chance, and not choice,
has provided him with. With this short preface I shall turn to my
notes of what proved to be a strange, though a peculiarly
terrible, chain of events.
It was a blazing hot day in August. Baker Street was like an
oven, and the glare of the sunlight upon the yellow brickwork of
the house across the road was painful to the eye. It was hard to
believe that these were the same walls which loomed so gloomily
through the fogs of winter. Our blinds were half-drawn, and
Holmes lay curled upon the sofa, reading and re-reading a letter
which he had received by the morning post. For myself, my term of
service in India had trained me to stand heat better than cold,
and a thermometer at ninety was no hardship. But the morning
paper was uninteresting. Parliament had risen. Everybody was out
of town, and I yearned for the glades of the New Forest or the
shingle of Southsea. A depleted bank account had caused me to
postpone my holiday, and as to my companion, neither the country
nor the sea presented the slightest attraction to him. He loved
to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his
filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to
every little rumour or suspicion of unsolved crime.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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