A collection of classic reprints and four original stories featuring Sherlock Holmes

In bringing to a close the adventures of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I am perforce reminded that he never, save on the occasion which, as you will now hear, brought his singular career to an end, consented to act in any mystery which was concerned with persons who made a livelihood by their pen.

I am not particular about the people I mix among for business purposes, he would say, but at literary characters I draw the line.

We were in our rooms in Baker Street one evening. I was (I remember) by the centre table writing out The Adventure of the Man Without a Cork Leg (which had so puzzled the Royal Society and all the other scientific bodies of Europe), and Holmes was amusing himself with a little revolver practice. It was his custom of a summer evening to fire round my head, just shaving my face, until he had made a photograph of me on the opposite wall, and it is a slight proof of his skill that many of these portraits in pistol shots are considered admirable likenesses.