Ah, the joys of unfortunate compositing!
Seriously now, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of eleven short stories featuring the famous consulting detective, and is a sequel to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
The stories, for the most part, follow a set format; the quality of the writing is of a high order; however, the quality of the stories is uneven. The collection starts with 'Silver Blaze', which is perhaps the strongest and most enjoyable story. 'The Musgrave Ritual' has a Gothic quality to its tale, while 'The Crooked Man' is a tale of revenge and redemption. Some of the others don't really work.
I enjoyed the previous collection more, but I still had a good time with this one (despite the duds). As usual, I stood no chance of solving the mysteries. There was one where Sherlock Holmes put forth a solution identical to my own, only to dismiss it as sloppy first thoughts. And that was about as close as I got - sloppy first thoughts. Luckily for me, the enjoyment I get from trying to solve a sleuthing problem far outweighs the disappointment of my feeble deductive abilities.
The Penguin eBook which combines the two collections is sometimes marred by poor transcription: for example, '... by no means the opinion one forms of a Russian nobleman' becomes '... by no means the opinion one form sofa Russian nobleman'. (I think that is a wee bit LOLworthy.) The well-written and informative footnotes made up for the boo-boos in the text. All in all, this edition by Penguin was worth the price of admission.
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