The Mystery of Orcival

Holmes and Watson take on a legend that stalks a family across the moors, and the case turns on whether the beast is a curse or a very human plan. The most famous of the four Holmes novels and the best place to start.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Twelve cases that made Sherlock Holmes a household name, including A Scandal in Bohemia and The Speckled Band. Short, self contained, and the clearest demonstration of how deduction is supposed to work.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The novel that introduced Holmes and Watson and set the template every detective story has followed since. A body with no wound, a word scrawled on the wall, and a backstory that reaches far beyond London.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The story that invented the detective genre in 1841. Poe gives you an impossible killing behind a locked door and a reasoner who solves it from an armchair, decades before Holmes existed.

Edgar Allan Poe

Poe's detective returns to work a real unsolved murder, thinly disguised as a case in Paris. It reads as an argument for reasoning from evidence rather than from newspaper speculation.

Edgar Allan Poe