It's been a while since I went through a Doyle phase, but I think I may dip back into them again soon. Took a class in detective fiction back in college, and we started with Wilkie Collins and Poe, then spent a lot of time on Doyle before capping it with Eco. I gotta go with either A Scandal in Bohemia or The Speckled Band as ones that stick out in my memory as particuarly good.
I was going to say "Johnny Wadd: Private Dick" but then I realized this was the wrong forum for that.
Well played. On another Holmesian note, there's a local guy here in the Twin Cities named Larry Millet, who's actually the architecture critic/columnist for the St Paul Pioneer Press, who's written several books over the last few years featuring Holmes and Watson in America. They're pretty good - the detective aspects may not be quite as intricate as some of Doyle's stories, but the books are extremely well researched and historically accurate, to the point of having footnotes to describe buildings and sometimes actual people living at the time that are worked into the storyline. Worth checking out if you can find them in your local library.
On one of the Edward Said threads, someone posted a link to streaming video interview on BookTV from a few years back, and when asked what he was reading at the time, Said mentioned Sherlock Holmes stories. Cool.
Bruce Alexander's "Blind Justice" series has an appeal similar to Doyle's Holmes. They're based on a real historical figure, a blind magistrate named Sir John Fielding (the brother of Henry Fielding of Tom Jones fame), who established the first organized police force in London and, in these books, runs around solving murder mysteries with the help of, and as described by a young ward named Jeremy Proctor.
Man, it has been a while since I read any of those short stories. Going to have to crack open one or two this weekend.
Silver Blaze. A Scandal in Bohemia is really good, too. It's been probably 20 years since I read those.
I gotta go with "A Scandal in Bohemia." I like the idea of Watson throwing a smoke bomb and the line "To Holmes, she will always be 'that woman'". I haven't read the stories in a while (I've probably been through the cycle four or five times), but there are tons of post-Doyle stories out there, some great, some terrible, many written by very famous writers. There are collections of comic Holmes stories, horror stories, science fiction, everything. But one of the most fascinating things I've ever read was a 2 volume Annotated Holmes collection. The footnotes and explanatory articles take up more space then the stories, obviously, and every one of them goes on the assumption that Sherlock Holmes was a real person; in this universe, Watson wrote the accounts and this fellow named AC Doyle was the editor who helped get them published. If aliens came to earth and found this book, there's not a clue that Holmes wasn't real. The Fairfax County Virginia library used to have these books, and with my birthday coming up... *hint* Also, in the last few months I've read a couple of graphic adaptations of Holmes. One was a completely silly comedy where Holmes is a demented coke fiend and Watson is the actual brains behind the operation. Its hilarious. The other centers on "the baker street irregulars. Entertaining as well. BUt really, Holmes may be the most interesting fictional character in the history of literature. There's a whole universe to explore inside that man's mind.