The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes - Stories and Writing

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.

Parallels to canonical stories are uncomfortably close sometimes. The stated intention of expanding the tantalising references Doyle made to unwritten cases did not work out, and the new stories often have to abridge those references, or quote them selectively, or explain them away.

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.