"The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" (1892) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I didn't really enjoy May Sinclair's Brontë biography at all - in fact, I started to think that it belongs to rusty, dusty pile of moth-eaten books that were once fashion but time had covered them with dust and that is all to it. However, there are some classics amongst old books and this is one of them.

For some time now, I am entertaining the idea of doing some more research on "crime & mystery" genre (mostly because I am intrigued with the fact that Agatha Christie had several contemporaries who were equally successful but are almost completely forgotten now) and no matter what I read and where I look, every roads leads to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who seems to have been true giant, originator of the whole genre. Sure, nobody is ever truly original and everybody is influenced by something or the other, but whoever were Doyle's literary ancestors, the short detective story found a peak with him and ever since authors bowed to his shrine.

This is a collection of twelve short stories published in magazine around 1891/1892 (later printed as a collection) and boy, are they good.

Sure, at this point we are so used to crime stories that plots are hardly surprising to us the way they used to be new to than-contemporary readers - we can practically "smell" the bad guy immediately, but this doesn't mean Doyle is old fashioned, it just points how much he was imitated forever since. If plots are a bit simple today, I still admire and enjoy Doyle's writing style very much, he is an elegant writer with a noble turn of phrasing and Sherlock Holmes (with all his oddities) is simply unforgettable. By the way, it sounds a bit strange now, all those allusions to his use of Morphine and Cocaine (and almost nonchalantly so, like smoking a pipe) but both of those were completely legal at the time of writing.
Its just one of funny little points where our new " enlightened" society actually limps behind our predecessors - we love to think that we are far more educated, safer and cleaner than people who lived before us and it might be so in many different cases, however when these short stories were published, it was absolutely unusual for main literary character to enjoy Cocaine and to even profit from its influence (is this how Sherlock Holmes got such brilliant observations?) - these days I can't even drink too much coffee without getting all hyperactive so I definitely wouldn't follow Holmes there, but its just funny little point.