The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes

The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes

First edition cover
Author	Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Detective fiction short stories
Publisher	J. Murray
Publication date	1954
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	313

The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes is a short story collection of Sherlock Holmes pastiches written by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr, first published in 1954. As an early and rather authoritative example of Sherlockian pastiche—the collaborators being the son and the authorised biographer of Holmes's creator—there is much to interest collectors.

Each story in this collection is postscripted with a quote from one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, making reference to an undocumented Holmes case, that inspired it.

Stories and writing

The stories contained in the collection are:

• "The Adventure of the Seven Clocks"
• "The Adventure of the Gold Hunter"
• "The Adventure of the Wax Gamblers"
• "The Adventure of the Highgate Miracle"
• "The Adventure of the Black Baronet"
• "The Adventure of the Sealed Room"
• "The Adventure of Foulkes Rath"
• "The Adventure of the Abbas Ruby"
• "The Adventure of the Dark Angels"
• "The Adventure of the Two Women"
• "The Adventure of the Deptford Horror"
• "The Adventure of the Red Widow"

The collaboration was not smooth, as Douglas G. Greene relates in John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles. There is some doubt about who wrote what—though at times Carr's highly recognisable style breaks through the convention of pastiching the original Conan Doyle stories.

In 1963 John Murray published two paperback volumes which divided the stories into The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by Adrian Conan Doyle and More Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr. The first title contains the last six stories listed above, the second the first six. Greene suggests that authorship may be more complex.