Anthony Horowitz, tapped to write The House of Silk, the first authorized Sherlock Holmes adventure since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s death 81 years ago, shares favorite Holmes stories with us.
I fell in love with the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was 16. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created not just a great detective but an entire world. Just think: fog, hansom cabs, gaslight, Stradivarius, liquid cocaine... and before you even get to Baker Street you know exactly where you are.
When I was asked to write The House of Silk, I reread the entire canon and promptly fell in love with them all over again, and if I have one hope for my book, it’s that it will introduce a new generation of readers to these wonderful stories. Here are my five favorites.
“The Adventure of the Speckled Band” has to be at the top of the list. Ask any Sherlockian to name the greatest of the stories and this will nearly always appear first. It was Doyle’s favorite, too. It has all the hallmarks that make Holmes stories great: a weird, sinister setting; an inexplicable murder; echoes of India and the colonies; a strong stench of the macabre.
“The Adventure of the Dying Detective” is an odd story in that it has no murder, no investigation, and only three characters: Holmes, Watson, and a deeply sinister individual, Mr. Culverton Smith of 13 Lower Burke Street. It is in many ways a chamber piece in Doyle’s repertoire. But it was always the one I liked best as a boy. The lethal device that almost kills Holmes always sticks in my mind. The resolution is surprising and delightful.
“The curious incident of the dog in the night-time...” is one of the most famous quotations in the canon [and memorably, the title of Mark Haddon’s 2003book] and it comes from an exchange in “Silver Blaze,” which has one of the most unusual killers in detective fiction. Again, the setting is Dartmoor. This time the murder victim is a horse trainer, John Straker. Another reason that I love Doyle is that he came up with such marvelous names.
The award for the best title has to go to The Hound of the Baskervilles. This is the novel with which Doyle reintroduced Holmes after his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls and marries the swirling fog of Dartmoor with an ancestral curse, an escaped convict, and, of course, the eponymous hellhound. Many of Doyle’s short stories are on the edge of gothic horror. This one moves well into the central ground.
A story with a great title is “The Adventure of the Bruce Partington Plans” which comes from the penultimate collection of short stories, “His Last Bow.” It can be argued that some of these later stories lack the earlier luster—Doyle had famously become bored with his creation and sometimes it shows. But Bruce Partington is special. Holmes’s brother, Mycroft, makes one of his rare appearances. Inspector Lestrade is there. And although London fog plays a smaller part in the stories than you’d think, it rolls all over this one—“a dense yellow fog” that defines the atmosphere and helps conceal the ingenious murder.
