The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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The characters of the book Sherlock Holmes are Detective Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson Holmes’ sidekick.  The book is made up of several short mysteries so the characters vary, but Watson and Holmes are in every story.  There are about 7 stories in the book and some of the characters in the stories are a man named Spaulding, Count Von Kramm and Irene Adler.

The setting of the book is in the early 1900’s. The methods of transportation are usually taxi cabs or horse-drawn carriages. They are in England so the people talk with a very proper english dialect and not so much slang like we do today. Even though it sounds like they are speaking old english they are actually speaking what is considered modern english.

Since there are multiple stories I’m only going to tell you about one of them. The story is called the Redhead League. The Redhead League is about a man named Mr. Wilson. He owned a small shop that was expanding and he needed an extra hand around so he hired a man named Spaulding. Spaulding was a small man with a bald head who was a hard worker and would work for minimum wage, so Mr. Wilson hired him. When Spaulding showed Mr. Wilson about an add in the paper for a job that only redheaded people could apply for which payed a large amount of money Mr. Wilson applied for it. He got the job and was asked to copy down the encyclopedia between 10 am and 2 pm every day. The man that hired him was acctually working with Spaulding to get Mr. Wilson away from the shop during the middle of the day so they could dig a tunnel from his building to the England National Bank’s vault. Each day in between 10 and 2 Spaulding was at the shop alone so he locked the front door and started to dig a tunnel. When he finally finished the tunnel they did not need him to be away from the shop anymore so they left a mysterious note stating that he was fired on the door. When Mr. Wilson returned to the shop he immediately contacted Holmes to investigate and sure enough that Tuesday night when the England National Bank got a very large shipment of gold the two thieves attempted to rob the bank, but were stopped by Holmes and the English police force.

This was a good book, because you weren’t reading about the same thing the entire time and the stories were short enough to read one each night before you go to sleep. I would highly recommend the book to anyone who likes good mystery stories.