His Last Bow

These eight stories are among the last adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In 'The Bruce-Partington Plans', Holmes and his brother Mycroft hunt for stolen plans of a secret submarine; in 'The Dying Detective', Holmes appears to be wasting away from a rare tropical disease; in 'The Devil's Foot', a strange poison drives a Cornish family to madness; and in the title story, set on the eve of the First World War in 1914, an older Holmes comes out of retirement to trap a German spy.

Arthur Conan Doyle collected the stories in 1917, during the war. The title story, told in the third person, ends with Holmes's famous words about the 'east wind' that is coming over England. Read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was born in Edinburgh, trained as a doctor and wrote stories while waiting for patients at his practice in Southsea. Sherlock Holmes, modelled partly on his old teacher Joseph Bell, who could diagnose a patient's life at a glance, first appeared in 1887 and soon made Doyle one of the best-paid writers in the world.

He grew tired of his detective, killed him off in 1893 and was forced by his readers to bring him back. Doyle also wrote historical novels, the adventure The Lost World and campaigns for wrongly convicted men. Start with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles.