ACD's Holmes Beyond the Canon

The 1981 Castle Books edition (left) and the 1995 Barnes & Noble 

Even if your Sherlock Holmes library is less than a shelf, it should include a book of the apocrypha, Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings about Holmes that are not part of the Canon. That includes, at minimum, two plays, two sketches, and two short stories (in which Holmes is unmistakably referenced but not named).

Such a book is The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Peter Haining. I already a Barnes & Noble copy of this 1995 book and recently acquired the earlier Castle Books edition from the library of the late R. Joel Senter, Sr., published in August 1981. Although I’m not a collector, I sometimes keep different editions of a book that happen to come my way.

(The Haining anthology is not to be confused with the Heritage Press book of the same name, edited and with an epilogue by Edgar W. Smith, which brings together His Last Bow, The Valley of Fear, and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. It was published in 1952, the year I was born. I inherited one of those from Joel, too.)

The Haining collection is a good one, but I don’t think it’s the best. For my thoughts on the superior version of the apocryphal Holmes, please click here to read my earlier blog post on Leslie S. Klinger’s The Apocrypha of Sherlock Holmes.