His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (Dover Thrift Editions: Crime/Mystery/Thrillers) Paperback – November 16, 2016

This is such a nice edition! I definitely plan on buying more books like it in the future!

They say all good things must come to an end, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it! Arthur Conan Doyle had attempted many times to stop writing Sherlock Holmes stories, but the reading public kept clamoring for more. At last, Doyle brought them an epilogue entitled “His Last Bow.”Readers of my blog may recall that I seldom read fiction books, but there are two notable exceptions to that rule: One of them is Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Although I hated to come to the end of these great stories, Doyle did some unusual things in this set of memoirs that I hadn’t read before, so it really kept me on my toes.For instance, in one story, Holmes solves the entire case while lying sick in his bed. And in the final story, Doyle uses a device never before seen in his great detective stories: he told the story not as he usually does in first person through Dr. John Watson, but in third person through an unnamed observer. There are a couple of other twists in these stories that careful Sherlock Holmes readers will probably catch as well.All in all, “His Last Bow” was a very enjoyable final send-off for the world’s greatest detective.

Although he also wrote several novels featuring the world's greatest fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, it was especially in his short stories that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle perfected the Holmes formula. "His Last Bow" (published in 1917) is the fourth of the five collections of Holmes short stories. The other collections all featured a dozen stories, but only eight stories make up "His Last Bow". The title is based on the final story of the same name, which portrays the retired Holmes active in bee-keeping, and emerging from retirement only to protect English secrets during the First World War. Doyle was arguably past his prime in producing Sherlock Holmes stories, but this is still a very good collection of stories, and although there are only eight stories, unlike some of the other collections there is no obviously inferior story among them. The Bruce-Partington Plans, The Dying Detective and The Devil's Foot are especially outstanding, but all the other stories in this collection are very good as well. It may not match the brilliance and popularity of the first three collections ("The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" and "The Return of Sherlock Holmes"), but it's not far behind, and Holmes fans will find every one of the eight stories of "His Last Bow" most enjoyable.Here's a list of the stories in this collection (with the better stories marked with stars):Wisteria Lodge, 1908 - This two-part story recounts the strange experiences of Mr. John Scott Eccles, whose Spanish host Garcia and his two servants mysteriously vanish overnight. How is the exiled tyrant Don Murillo, the Tiger of San Pedro, behind these events?The Cardboard Box, 1893 - Susan Cushing opens a parcel in a box, horrified to find two severed human ears - but whose are they and why are they sent to her?The Red Circle, 1911 - Mrs. Warren has a mysterious lodger who never emerges from his room, and how is this connected to a secret society called "the Red Circle"?*The Bruce-Partington Plans, 1908 - Some top-secret plans for a Bruce-Partington submarine are found in the pockets of a dead man who falls off a train, but where are the rest of the plans, and how and why did they get stolen?*The Dying Detective, 1913 - Holmes is delirious and dying of a tropical Chinese disease. His only hope for survival appears to be Mr. Culverton Smith, a specialist in such diseases, but unfortunately also a criminal who would be glad to see Holmes die.Lady Frances Carfax, 1911 - When Lady Frances Carfax goes missing, her life is unwittingly threatened by Holy Peters, an unscrupulous criminal from Australia who is now posing as someone else.*The Devil's Foot, 1910 - A thrilling and convincing story, as Mortimer Tregennis reports the bizarre death of his sister and sudden madness of his two brothers. The story complicates with the death of Mortimer himself, and the involvement of the African explorer Dr. Leon Sterndale. Holmes discounts supernatural involvement, and looks for some natural explanation.His Last Bow, 1917 - Holmes emerges from his retirement (spent beekeeping and completing his magnus opus "Practical Handbook of Bee Culture") to thwart the German spy Baron Von Bork from disclosing secret English documents on the eve of World War I.- GODLY GADFLY

Although a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, I was not a big fan of the book, THE VALLEY OF FEAR, which preceded this collection of stories. Fortunately, HIS LAST BOW found Sir Arthur Conan Doyle back in form. The eight stories in this volume, for the most part, hold up well when compared to those in earlier works. Sure, at times it feels a bit old hack, but that is only because this volume, book eight out of nine, comes so late in the Sherlock Holmes' canon. If this book had come earlier, with some other collection of stories coming later, the relative feeling of freshness would be reversed.Of the eight stories, five are routine detective stories, of which The Devil's Foot, in this reviewer's humble opinion, stands out. Of the remaining three stories, The Adventure of the Dying Detective is rather interesting, as Holmes makes use of one of his noteworthy skills other than detection and logic. As Watson said in an earlier work, when Sherlock Holmes decided upon a career as a private detective, it meant that several other arenas, such as science or the stage, lost an exceptionally promising practitioner. True, true.The other two stories, The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans and the title story His Last Bow, show Holmes to be the admirable patriot, using his skills for the benefit of Britain. Mycroft, Sherlock's smarter but lazier brother, appears in one and we learn some interesting tidbit about him.If you have made it this far into the Holmes' canon, there would be no reason to stop now. Surely nothing in HIS LAST BOW would make one want to anyway.

The last of Conan Doyle's Holmes stories go out on a whimper I'm afraid to say with very little atmosphere, defining moments or spellbinding mystery. It's safe to say that Sir Arthur was bored of the character by this point and grudged bringing him back from the dead after his tussle with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.I know I am repeating myself, I mentioned this in a review for a previous book but it's clear Conan Doyle was running out of ideas. With only eight stories making up this book (a couple of them less than 20 pages) he still ends up being quite repetitive and pretty much condenses his Holmes novel  The Valley of Fear (Classic Crime)  into a short story called 'The Red Circle'.The final story has a bittersweet, if unremarkable, ending and has very little story or point to it. Many writers have kept Holmes alive over the years with various books, radio plays and films and have done so with more affection than Conan Doyle. He created one of the most popular characters in history but thought so little of him.

Sherlock Holmes last bow. Was great to listen to I still like listen to them over again

Conan Doyle can do no wrong for me.

The overall production is very good. However, it is hard to distinguish between the voice of Holmes (Cliver Merrison) and that of Watson (Michael Williams). In other productions of Sherlock Holms this has not been the case; for example, Basil Rathbone (Holmes) and Nigel Bruce (Watson) or Douglas Wilmer (Holmes) and Nigel Stock (Watson).