I really struggled with this - it is really very inane stuff. I am determined however not to give up on any book (which is why I'm leaving Ulysses until last) so I persevered with Holmes. I'm not sure I would recommend it however. There were far too many neat Scooby-Doo type endings..."Oh my god, its Old Man Withers from the Haunted amusement park!". Perhaps Holmes was original in it's time and spawned the great crime infatuation we have today. With modern sensibility however I found the structure of the stories repetitive and the story-lines predicable.
The stories did get more complicated, exotic, and convoluted as they progressed - perhaps I wasn't the only one to make the above complaints.
I think perhaps that this is one of those books on this list of Top 100 that doesn't really deserve to be here (along with Bridget Jones' Diary which I'm not really looking forward to reading).
On a moonlit night at my uncles farm many years ago I read a book by Irving Wallace called The Fabulous Originals. Wallace explored the lives of extraordinary people who inspired famous characters in fiction. Dr Joseph Bell was the inspiration of Holmes because of his uncanny ability to make large deductions from the smallest observation. After reading about the real thing, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was a disappointment.
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