World's Best Reading is a series of classic books published by Readers Digest beginning in 1982. This volume published in 1986 contains two of Sir Arthur Conan's complete classic detective novels, A Study In Scarlet (1887) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). Included is the 4-page Publisher's insert.
Illustrations by Greg Spalenka with an Afterword by G.K. Chesterton.
A Study In Scarlet
The astonishing debut of Sherlock Holmes and his partner in detection, Dr. Watson
Shot in the shoulder and brought to death’s door by typhoid fever, Dr. John Watson is sent home from the second Afghan war with a small income and nothing to do but recover his health. By his own account, he leads a meaningless existence in London until a chance encounter with an old friend brings news of comfortable lodgings on Baker Street. In a hospital laboratory, Watson meets his potential new roommate for the first time. “How are you?” asks Mr. Sherlock Holmes. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
With that remarkable feat of observation, one of literature’s greatest partnerships is born. In their first case, Holmes and Watson set off for an abandoned flat in Lauriston Gardens. An American has been found dead, his body unmarked, a mysterious word—Rache—spelled out in blood on the wall. Scotland Yard thinks the murderer meant to write the name Rachel, but Holmes knows better. When the dead man’s private secretary turns up stabbed through the heart, the same word scrawled nearby, it is up to the world’s only consulting detective and his eager companion to find a killer whose lust for revenge has spanned two continents and dozens of years.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson face a mystery on the moors in this classic caper from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The country doctor had come to 221B Baker Street, the famous lodgings of Sherlock Holmes, with an eerie tale—the legend of the Hound of the Baskervilles, the devil-beast that haunted the lonely moors around the Baskervilles’ ancestral home. The tale warned the descendants of that ancient family never to venture out on the moor. But Sir Charles Baskerville was now dead—and the footprints of a giant hound have been found near his body. Would the new heir of the Baskervilles meet the same dreadful fate? Sherlock Holmes and his faithful friend, Dr. Watson, are faced with their most terrifying case in this wonderful classic of masterful detection and bone-chilling suspense.
About the Author
A prolific author of books, short stories, poetry, and more, the Scottish writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is best known for the creation of one of literature’s most vivid and enduring characters: Sherlock Holmes. Through detailed observation, vast knowledge, and brilliant deduction, Holmes and his trusted friend, Dr. Watson, step into the swirling fog of Victorian London to rescue the innocent, confound the guilty, and solve the most perplexing puzzles known to literature.
