Title: The Adventure of the Six Napoleons and Other Cases

Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Category: Fiction

Page Count: 330

Rating: 3.5/5

I felt a bit cheated by this one, because I’ve had it on my shelves for a while now and I’d been looking forward to getting to it. I was under the unfortunate misapprehension that this was a collection of Conan Doyle’s historical fiction, but it turned out to just be a bunch of Sherlock Holmes short stories that I’d already read.

As a consequence, I didn’t bother to re-read it, and yet here I am writing a review because I have actually read it all, just in the original editions. I don’t really understand why this actually exists, seeing as it’s basically just a bind-up of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, with one or two other stories thrown in just for the hell of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Sherlock Holmes, and that’s the only reason why I still gave this book a fairly good rating. I just can’t see why you’d want to read it when you could just read the short stories in the original books they’re from. If I’d read this one first, it would have been a huge pain to then read the others because I’d have read most of the stories except for one or two of them.

There’s also the fact that the stories are in the public domain, and so the whole thing left me feeling kind of dirty. I’m pretty sure this is just Penguin trying to make some more money out of Holmes rather than an attempt to provide anything of value, and I’m even more annoyed that I fell for it by picking the book up in the first place, although at least it was second hand. Do yourself a favour and just don’t bother with it.

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