The Case Book Of Sherlock Holmes - Facsimile from The Strand Magazine volumes LXII, LXIII, LXV, LXVII, LXIX, LXXII, LXXIII,
October 1921 - April 1927
Comprising 12 short stories with original illustrations (and advertisements!).
This was the last series of Holmes stories written by Conan-Doyle. And you can kinda tell he wasn't really into it by the last few stories.
The first 5 are pretty good and what you would expect, but then after that the quality declines quite rapidly, a couple of the remainder even excluding Watson entirely as Doyle experiments, somewhat unsuccessfully, to write stories entirely from Holme's perspective with Holmes as the narrator instead of Watson and Watson not in the story.
Not only that but the twists, intrigue and general deduction aspects also start to evaporate with the whole story just being exposition with Holmes solving the case in the last paragraph with one clue.
It's still an interesting read none-the-less, especially the better initial ones, including a couple of more actiony two-parters, just the latter half of the stories feels like a bit of a waste of time.
The stories are mostly set around 1902 and it's interesting to see a black character feature prominently in one of them. Admittedly, he's a criminal character and, admittedly, there is a use of the N word and all that, but the character is still written in a sympathetic way and, more importantly, shows that black culture was indeed something that existed in London even at that time.