Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a working Edinburgh physician when he invented the world's most famous consulting detective. He built Sherlock Holmes on a real man, his old medical professor Joseph Bell, who could read a stranger's trade and history from a glance at their hands.
This page holds 59 free Arthur Conan Doyle books in PDF, and the complete Sherlock Holmes canon is here: the four novels, the five story collections, and the individual cases. Beyond Baker Street you will find Professor Challenger hunting dinosaurs, medieval archers in The White Company, and the spiritualism writings of his last years.
Doyle invented the shape of modern detective fiction, then spent thirty years insisting his historical novels were the better work. Pick a section, open a book, and decide for yourself.
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Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes Books
The complete Sherlock Holmes canon in publication order, from the 1887 novel that introduced Holmes and Watson to the last collection Doyle published in 1927. If you are starting from zero, start at the top.
The first case, and the first time Watson describes the man he has just moved in with. Holmes reads a stranger's whole history off his sleeve, and detective fiction changes shape.
A woman receives a pearl in the post every year from someone she has never met. The case that gives Holmes his clearest statement of method, and Watson his marriage.
The individual cases, each one a self-contained puzzle you can finish in an afternoon. These short stories are the best way to meet Arthur Conan Doyle before committing to a full collection.
Doyle's other great character is a loud, bearded scientist who punches journalists and finds living dinosaurs. The Lost World is the book that gave us every lost-plateau story since.
Professor Challenger claims there is a plateau in South America where dinosaurs survive, and assembles an expedition to prove it. Every lost world story since owes this one.
Doyle considered these novels his real work and resented that Holmes overshadowed them. Knights, Napoleonic cavalry officers, and bare-knuckle boxers, all researched to the last buckle.
A company of English archers crosses to France during the Hundred Years War. Doyle researched the armour and the archery obsessively and thought this his best work.
Before Baker Street and alongside it, Doyle wrote ghost stories, Arctic hauntings, and medical horror. Few readers know this side of him, and it is worth the detour.
After losing his son in the First World War, Doyle spent his remaining years arguing publicly that the dead can be reached. These books are him making that case in his own words.
Doyle reported from the front in two wars and campaigned against colonial atrocities in the Congo. This non-fiction is the journalist behind the novelist.
Doyle tried to kill Holmes off in 1893, and readers wore black armbands in the street until he brought him back. Every Arthur Conan Doyle book on this page is public domain and free to download, so start wherever the mood takes you.
