Sherlock Holmes short story: The Adventure of the Six Napoleons – it’s a bust up 32/56

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 February my target is to read all (or at very least most) of the 12 stories in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and also the 13 in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.]

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: April 1904

Wikipedia here

Online here

Review: I would recommend this, although it is clearly a Blue Carbuncle Situation (a mislaid item the Baddie wants).  This got used to comic effect in the Rockford Files episode “The Italian Bird Fiasco”

And here we are with a Hudson again!  Not just the landlady and dodgy geezer (Gloria Scott) the lane (Crooked Man), but a statue seller.

Should see if anyone has written about Holmes and animals and animal imagery (p592 has the baddie as both ape and wolf, and Holmes as a  tiger.)

Best sentence(s): 

Words I didn’t know: 

In rapid succession we passed through the fringe of fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, literary London, commercial London, and, finally, maritime London, till we came to a riverside city of a hundred thousand souls, where the tenement houses swelter and reek with the outcasts of Europe. Here, in a broad thoroughfare, once the abode of wealthy City merchants, we found the sculpture works for which we searched

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“The Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution if you only know how to use it

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“Excellent, Lestrade, excellent!” he cried. “But I didn’t quite follow

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A flush of colour sprang to Holmes’s pale cheeks, and he bowed to us like the master dramatist who receives the homage of his audience. It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause.