22 September 2026
The usual advice is to start at the beginning, and for Sherlock Holmes the usual advice is wrong. The beginning is A Study in Scarlet, from 1887, and halfway through it abandons Holmes altogether for a long flashback about Mormon settlers in Utah — no detective, no case, no Baker Street. A good number of people have started there and concluded that Holmes is overrated.
Holmes became Holmes in the short stories. Doyle wrote fifty-six of those against only four novels, and the first of them, A Scandal in Bohemia, ran in The Strand in 1891 and turned a moderately successful character into the most famous man in London. It is also the one where he loses. Irene Adler works out what he is doing, beats him to it, and leaves the country — and for the rest of the canon Holmes refers to her simply as "the woman." Doyle establishes in the very first short story that the genius is beatable, which is most of why the other fifty-five work.
After that, The Hound of the Baskervilles — the one novel that entirely comes off. Holmes is missing from long stretches of it, which sounds like a defect and is the reverse: Watson alone on the moor, writing reports to a detective who is not there, is the most sustained piece of atmosphere Doyle ever managed. It was published in 1901, eight years after Doyle had thrown Holmes off a waterfall, and it sidesteps the problem by being set earlier rather than bringing him back.
If those land and you want what Holmes made possible, The Mysterious Affair at Styles is Agatha Christie's first novel and Poirot's first case, written while she was dispensing medicines in a wartime hospital — which is why its poisoning is accurate enough that a pharmaceutical journal reviewed the book approvingly. And The Woman in White, thirty years before Holmes, is the detective novel still being invented: no detective in it, just an ordinary man who decides to start asking questions and keeping records.