In 2026 I plan to read all the Conan Doyle “Sherlock Holmes” works – 56 short stories and 4 novels (here’s why and how). If you haven’t already read it, Michael Green’s “undiscovered letter” from John Watson is fricking hilarious.
In January I am reading the 12 stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collection.
I may also read various Holmes homages/pastiches etc. Who knows? (btw I’d recommend the Seven Per Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer where Watson has to trick Holmes into going to Vienna to be treated by Sigmund Freud).
Published: June 1892
Wikipedia here
Online here
Review: I would not recommend this as a “mystery” – it’s just womjep, the earlier story “A Case of Identity” mashed up with Jane Eyre?! But there’s lots of quotable bits, so, there’s that (see below).
And a sly attempt at Watson matchmaking, but Holmes not being interested in women. Was Doyle trying to tell us something?!
The Sins of the Cities of the Plain; or, The Recollections of a Mary-Ann, with Short Essays on Sodomy and Tribadism, by the pseudonymous “Jack Saul“, is one of the first exclusively homosexual works of pornographic literature published in English. The book was first published in 1881 by William Lazenby, who printed 250 copies. A second edition was published by Leonard Smithers in 1902. It sold for an expensive four guineas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sins_of_the_Cities_of_the_Plain
Best sentence(s):
As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. I think that I have touched bottom at last, however. This note I had this morning marks my zero-point, I fancy. Read it!” He tossed a crumpled letter across to me.
Xxx
“That is a possible solution—in fact, as matters stand, it is the most probable one. But in any case it does not seem to be a nice household for a young lady.” “But the money, Mr. Holmes, the money!”
Xxx
Holmes shook his head gravely. “It would cease to be a danger if we could define it,” said he.
xxx
As to Holmes, I observed that he sat frequently for half an hour on end, with knitted brows and an abstracted air, but he swept the matter away with a wave of his hand when I mentioned it. “Data! data! data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.” And yet he would always wind up by muttering that no sister of his should ever have accepted such a situation.
xxx
But Holmes shook his head gravely. “Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”
“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?” “They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
xxxx
“I have devised seven separate explanations, each of which would cover the facts as far as we know them. But which of these is correct can only be determined by the fresh information which we shall no doubt find waiting for us.
xxxx
His whole life appears to be spent in an alternation between savage fits of passion and gloomy intervals of sulking. Giving pain to any creature weaker than himself seems to be his one idea of amusement, and he shows quite remarkable talent in planning the capture of mice, little birds, and insects.
xxx
“My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining light as to the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don’t you see that the converse is equally valid. I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children. This child’s disposition is abnormally cruel, merely for cruelty’s sake, and whether he derives this from his smiling father, as I should suspect, or from his mother, it bodes evil for the poor girl who is in their power.”
xxx
As to Miss Violet Hunter, my friend Holmes, rather to my disappointment, manifested no further interest in her when once she had ceased to be the centre of one of his problems, and she is now the head of a private school at Walsall, where I believe that has she met with considerable success
Allusions I had to look up: xx
See also:
Women, Economics, and Sherlock Holmes’s Gift-Labor Zi-Ling Yan Intergrams 18.2(2018): http://benz.nchu.edu.tw/~intergrams/intergrams/182/182-yan.pdf ISSN: 1683-4186
Ward V, Orbell J. Sherlock Holmes as a Social Scientist. Political Science Teacher. 1988;1(4):15-18. doi:10.1017/S0896082800000398
“Who gets to be a suspect in the Sherlock Holmes canon?Suspicion as a conservative socio-political structure or as narrative brio.”Nathalie Jaëck
marchudson.net 
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