Start with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Twelve short stories, published in the Strand between 1891 and 1892, and the format Conan Doyle actually invented: a client in the Baker Street sitting room, a deduction from a hat or a walking stick, a train out of London, a solution. A Scandal in Bohemia, The Red-Headed League and The Speckled Band are all in this volume, and any one of them is a better introduction than either novel.
The conventional answer is A Study in Scarlet, because it is first and it has the meeting scene. Here is the honest problem with it: a third of the way in, Holmes and Watson vanish entirely and the book relocates to Utah for a long flashback about Mormon settlers, which has almost nothing to do with detection and is where a lot of first-time readers close the book. If you want the meeting — and it is a genuinely great scene — read the first fifty pages of A Study in Scarlet, stop at the flashback, and come back for the rest later.
The canon, in publication order
- A Study in Scarlet (1887)
- The Sign of Four (1890)
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
- The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894) — includes The Final Problem. Not held separately in our catalogue, but it is inside The Oxford Sherlock Holmes, which collects the whole canon.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
- The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905)
- The Valley of Fear (1915)
- His Last Bow [8 stories] (1917)
- The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)
Nine volumes, four novels, fifty-six short stories. That is the whole thing.
Publication order versus chronology
There is a real chronological order, reconstructed from the internal dating of the cases, and Holmesian scholars have argued about it for a century — William Baring-Gould's arrangement is the best known, and no two reconstructions agree, because Watson's dates contradict each other constantly.
Read publication order anyway. The reason is The Final Problem and the Great Hiatus. Doyle killed Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893, spent a decade refusing to bring him back, then wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles as a case set before the fall, and finally resurrected him properly in The Return of Sherlock Holmes. That sequence — death, an evasive prequel, then a resurrection — is one of the most interesting things that ever happened in popular fiction, and chronological order flattens it completely.
The friction point is The Valley of Fear, which is set before Reichenbach and features Moriarty, but was published twenty years after his death. In publication order it arrives as a flashback, which is exactly how its first readers received it.
Honest warnings
Both novels with American flashbacks — A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear — split in half and lose Holmes for the middle section. The Utah material and the Pennsylvania coalfield material are competent adventure writing, but they are not what you came for.
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes is the weakest volume by common agreement. Doyle was in his late sixties, plainly bored, and two of the stories are narrated by Holmes himself, which does not work. A few are strong; most are not.
The period attitudes are what you would expect of the 1890s, and the treatment of colonial subjects in particular is dated.
Where to stop
After The Return of Sherlock Holmes you have every story anyone quotes and the complete rise-fall-return arc. That is a genuinely satisfying stopping point. If you want the whole canon, His Last Bow [8 stories] is worth it for its title story alone, and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes is for completists. Browse more reading paths after Baker Street.
Follow the full ordered path here: Sherlock Holmes Reading Order: Where to Start.
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