Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in Memoriam - The valley of fear - like a rare plant, not so easy to find - a short bibliographical guide

摘要

Notwithstanding the fact that the 22nd May 2009 marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Conan Doyle, it is still timely to reflect that, despite his avowal, "If I had a good competence I would devote myself to some serious literary or historical work", and that out of the resulting fictional undertakings (twenty-three novels, four collections of stories, three separate stories, two collections of poems), the additional four Sherlock Holmes novels (or novellas as some prefer to call them):A study in scarlet (published 1888), The sign of four (1890), The hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and The valley of fear (1915), and fifty-six stories in collections of twelve (The adventures of Sherlock Holmes; The casebook), eleven (The memoirs of Sherlock Holmes), thirteen (The return of Sherlock Holmes), and eight (His last bow), are what, as Ruth Rendell (since 1997 Baroness Rebdell of Babergh) writes (see Guide), demonstrate his genius. His other literary works, with perhaps the exception of the Professor Challenger stories (see Souchier in BSBI News 106: 27-29), being largely only vaguely remembered.