Surely no man would take up my profession if it were not that danger attracts him. In The Casebook, you can read the final twelve stories that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about his brilliant detective. They are perhaps the most unusual and the darkest that he penned. Treachery, mutilation and the terrible consequences of infidelity are just some of the themes explored in these stories, along with atmospheric touches of the gothic, involving a bloodsucking vampire, crypts at midnight and strange bones in a furnace. The collection His Last Bow features some of Sherlock Holmes most dramatic cases, including the vicious revenge intrigue connected with The Red Circle and the insidious murders in The Devils Foot. The title story recounts how Sherlock Holmes is brought out of retirement to help the government foil a German plot on the eve of the First World War. These two fascinating sets of stories make a glorious farewell to the greatest detective of them all and his erstwhile companion, Dr Watson. Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859, the son of Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary (Foley) Doyle, both practising Roman Catholics. In order to supplement his income (he was an unsuccessful architect) his father painted and made illustrated books. Doyle attended the Jesuit Stonyhurst College but had abandoned his family’s Catholicism by the time he had completed his medical studies at Edinburgh University. In 1884 he married Louise Hawkins and qualified as a doctor in 1885 after which he practised as an eye specialist near Portsmouth until 1891, when he became a full-time writer. His father died in an asylum in 1893 after being institutionalized for some years. The first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was written in 1886 over a three week period and published a year later. This was followed by a second novel, The Sign of the Four (1890), and the first collection of short stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), all of which were first published in the Strand Magazine. Despite the huge popularity of the Holmes stories, Doyle felt they detracted from his other, more serious writing, so in the last story of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894) ‘The Final Problem’, Doyle killed off Holmes in a final, fatal confrontation with the arch-villain, Professor Moriarty. There was a huge public reaction, with 20,000 subscriptions to the Strand magazine cancelled, but Doyle resisted the pressure to bring back his finest creation until 1902, when he released The Hound of the Baskervilles, a full-length novel set earlier in Holmes’ career. Finally, in ‘The Empty Room’, the first story in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, he restored Holmes to life. Further stories appeared sporadically. The Valley of Fear, a novel in 1915, and two further collections of stories, His Last Bow (1917) and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1927).