The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of 12 short stories featuring detective Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. John Watson. The stories span the later years of Holmes's career and his retirement, with most narrated by Watson, two by Holmes himself, and one told in the third person.

In "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client," an unnamed but powerful figure, represented by the diplomat Sir James Damery, hires Holmes to prevent the marriage of Violet de Merville to Baron Adelbert Gruner, an Austrian whom Holmes recognizes as a murderer. Violet is utterly devoted to the Baron and dismisses all warnings. Holmes enlists Kitty Winter, one of Gruner's former mistresses, who reveals the existence of a leather diary in which Gruner records every woman he has ruined. When a direct appeal to Violet fails, Holmes devises a plan: Watson poses as a collector to distract Gruner with a rare Ming saucer while Holmes breaks into the study to steal the diary. During the burglary, Kitty throws vitriol, or sulfuric acid, into Gruner's face, disfiguring him. The diary's contents are shown to Violet, and the marriage is called off.

"The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier," narrated by Holmes during Watson's absence, concerns James Dodd, a former soldier searching for his wartime comrade Godfrey Emsworth. Godfrey's father, Colonel Emsworth, claims his son is traveling abroad, but Dodd glimpses Godfrey's ghostly white face at a window and discovers he is hidden in a locked outbuilding on the family estate. Holmes deduces that Godfrey, wounded during the Boer War in South Africa, inadvertently slept in a leper hospital and developed symptoms upon returning home. His family concealed him to avoid mandatory segregation. Holmes brings along Sir James Saunders, a distinguished dermatologist, who determines the condition is ichthyosis, a non-infectious skin disorder, not leprosy.

"The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone," told in the third person, finds Holmes pursuing the stolen Crown diamond, a great yellow gemstone called the Mazarin stone. His suspects are Count Negretto Sylvius, a dangerous big-game hunter, and Sam Merton, a boxer. Expecting the thieves to attempt assassination, Holmes uses a wax dummy of himself in the Baker Street window to draw fire and sends Watson to fetch police. When Sylvius and Merton confer privately, believing Holmes is in his bedroom playing violin, Holmes slips through a second door, replaces the dummy in the window chair, and seizes the diamond the moment Sylvius produces it. The criminals are arrested.

In "The Adventure of the Three Gables," Holmes investigates after Mrs. Mary Maberley, a widow, receives a suspicious offer to buy her house and all its contents. Her late son Douglas, a former attaché in Rome, had recently died, and his personal effects have just arrived from Italy. That night, burglars chloroform Mrs. Maberley and steal a manuscript from Douglas's trunks. Holmes traces the scheme to Isadora Klein, a wealthy widow about to marry a young duke. Douglas had been her lover; after she discarded him, he wrote a novel exposing their affair. Isadora hired criminals to obtain and destroy the manuscript. Holmes extracts a check for 5,000 pounds from Isadora to send Mrs. Maberley on a trip around the world.

"The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" begins when Robert Ferguson, a tea broker, asks Holmes to investigate his Peruvian-born wife, who has been caught with blood on her lips after bending over their baby's neck. Holmes travels to the Ferguson home and notices South American weapons on the walls, including a small bird-bow with poison darts, and a family dog with mysterious paralysis. He deduces that the wife was not drinking the baby's blood but sucking poison from a wound inflicted by Jack, Ferguson's jealous 15-year-old son from a first marriage, who has a physical disability. Jack had tested the poison on the dog first. The wife kept silent to spare her husband the pain of learning the truth. Holmes recommends a year at sea for Jack, and the couple reconciles.

In "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs," set in June 1902, a man calling himself John Garrideb claims that a deceased American's will divides a vast fortune among three men sharing the rare surname Garrideb. He has found one, the reclusive collector Nathan Garrideb, and needs a third. Holmes identifies the American as "Killer" Evans, a Chicago criminal who years earlier shot a counterfeiter named Rodger Prescott, the former tenant of Nathan's rooms. Evans invented the inheritance scheme to lure Nathan away so he could access a hidden cellar containing Prescott's counterfeiting press and forged banknotes. Holmes and Watson lie in wait; Evans fires at them, grazing Watson's thigh, and Holmes knocks him unconscious. Nathan, devastated that the inheritance was a fiction, experiences a mental health crisis.

"The Problem of Thor Bridge" involves Neil Gibson, a powerful American gold-mining magnate, who hires Holmes to clear his children's governess, Grace Dunbar, of murdering Gibson's Brazilian wife, Maria. Maria was found shot on a stone bridge, with a note in Grace's handwriting clutched in her hand and a matching revolver in the governess's wardrobe. Holmes notices a fresh chip on the bridge's stonework and demonstrates that Mrs. Gibson committed suicide while staging the scene to frame Grace. The dead woman had tied a string from the revolver to a stone hung over the parapet; after shooting herself, the weight pulled the weapon into the water below.

In "The Adventure of the Creeping Man," set in September 1903, Professor Presbury, a 61-year-old physiologist, becomes engaged to a much younger woman and then begins behaving strangely at nine-day intervals: crawling on hands and feet, climbing walls with ape-like agility, and provoking his own wolfhound. Holmes discovers the Professor has been injecting himself with a serum derived from the black-faced Langur, a Himalayan climbing primate, supplied by a Prague scientist named Lowenstein as a rejuvenation treatment. The drug produces simian behavior while leaving Presbury's intellect intact. The dog, sensing its master's transformation, attacks and nearly kills him.

"The Adventure of the Lion's Mane," narrated by the retired Holmes from his Sussex coastal home, concerns the death of Fitzroy McPherson, a young science master who staggers up from the beach covered in dark red welts and gasps "the lion's mane" before dying. Suspicion falls on Ian Murdoch, a volatile colleague who loved the same woman McPherson was secretly engaged to. When McPherson's dog dies at the same spot and Murdoch himself is found with identical welts, Holmes identifies the killer: Cyanea capillata, the lion's mane jellyfish, a highly venomous creature lurking in the bathing pool.

In "The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger," a woman named Mrs. Ronder, whose face has been horribly disfigured, confesses to Holmes that she and her lover Leonardo, a circus strongman, murdered her brutal husband. Leonardo struck Ronder with a club designed to mimic a lion's claw marks, and Mrs. Ronder released their circus lion to cover the crime. The lion attacked her instead, destroying her face, and Leonardo fled. She has lived as a veiled recluse ever since. When Holmes senses she is contemplating suicide, he tells her that patient suffering itself has value. She later sends him a bottle of prussic acid, a lethal poison, with a note that she will follow his advice and choose to live.

"The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place" concerns Sir Robert Norberton, a reckless gambler who has staked everything on his horse winning the Derby. When his sister Lady Beatrice Falder, whose life interest in the estate provides his income, dies of dropsy, a condition involving severe fluid retention, Sir Robert conceals her death. He has an actor impersonate Lady Beatrice in her carriage and hides her body in the family crypt. Holmes exposes the deception when a spaniel that knew Lady Beatrice snarls at the impostor. Sir Robert confesses but is treated leniently after his horse wins the Derby and he pays his debts.

In the final story, "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman," Josiah Amberley, a miserly retired manufacturer, claims his younger wife eloped with a neighbor, Dr. Ray Ernest, taking 7,000 pounds. Holmes discovers that Amberley's alibi for the night of the supposed elopement is false, and that a gas pipe has been installed into Amberley's sealed strong-room. Amberley murdered both his wife and Dr. Ernest out of jealousy, gassing them in the room and painting the house to cover the smell. When confronted, Amberley tries to swallow poison but is restrained and arrested. Holmes directs police to search a disused well on the property for the bodies.