Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Dover Reader

This big book of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories is quite a bargain in both size and quality. Several novels and a sprinkling of short stories show the width and breath of this famous story-teller. Beginning with his most well-known creation, Sherlock Holmes, we are treated to two novels, A STUDY IN SCARLET and THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, along with two of his best stories concerning Holmes: A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA and THE FINAL PROBLEM. In addition there is the rather tedious THE LOST WORLD, a precursor to Crichton's JURRASSIC PARK, but one that lacks the charm of some of his other work. Also there is a pair of supernatural tales of which THE RING OF THOTH is a genuine find and greatly entertaining. Dover does an excellent job of transitioning this material to e-book format with a well devised active table of contents and a glitch-free presentation.

While the very brief introduction notes prove Conan Doyle struggled to get his other works out of the great shadow cast by Sherlock Holmes, this book doesn't really manage to redress that. It is, of course, however, highly entertaining stuff, and worthy of being put into the pantheon of classics. Two of the Holmes novels, and two of the more noted short stories, get the company of ''The Lost World'', and a brace of the macabre genre stories ACD was able to churn out most profligately – both in this case revolving round unfortunately extended life. So the reader coming to this author for the first time here might think him a bit of a two-trick pony, when he was incredibly versatile, and inherently talented. Still, as a primer, this is pretty much as good as you'll get, and despite the lack of real detail, introduction or anything not in the public domain as a free digital file, it's well worth investing in.