The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

In a London of gas lamps, hansom cabs and yellow fog, one man can read a stranger's whole life off the mud on his boots. Sherlock Holmes is a consulting detective — the last court of appeal for people the police have given up on — and Dr John Watson is the army surgeon who shares his rooms at 221B Baker Street and writes down what he sees. These are the twelve cases Watson chose to publish, and each one is complete in a single chapter.

A king comes masked to Baker Street because a singer holds a photograph that could end his marriage. A red-headed pawnbroker is paid four pounds a week to copy out an encyclopaedia and cannot imagine why. A typist's fiancé steps into a cab on the morning of the wedding and never steps out again. A farmer is beaten to death beside a Herefordshire pool and his own son is arrested, though the dying man's last word was the name of an Australian town. Five dried orange seeds arrive by post, and every man who receives them dies. A respectable husband vanishes from an opium den above the Thames. A Christmas goose is found to have swallowed a stolen jewel. A frightened woman hears a low whistle at three in the morning, in the room where her sister died.

The cases darken as the book goes on — a killing in a locked room, a severed thumb, a bride who disappears from her own wedding breakfast, a father who accuses his son, a young woman kept behind a barred door — and what changes is not only the crime but the pair solving it. Holmes begins deciding for himself which criminals the law should reach; Watson learns what standing beside him costs.

Because every case closes inside its own chapter, this is a book you can read one sitting at a time. The vocabulary of clues, questions and arrests repeats while the stories keep changing — which is exactly what makes a detective collection good for a learner. Every chapter carries its own illustrations and its own vocabulary page with English glosses.