THE DOINGS OF RAFFLES HAW
UK publication: 1892 (Cassell)
US publication: 1892 (Lovell)
Detective:
Plot summary and comments:
THE MYSTERY OF CLOOMBER
UK publication: 1889 (Ward)
US publication: 1895 (R. F. Fenno)
Detective:
Plot summary and comments:
THE SURGEON OF GASTER FELL
UK publication: 1885 (Ivers)
US publication: ca. 1920 (Westbrook)
Detective:
Plot summary and comments:
THE BLACK DOCTOR AND OTHER TALES OF TERROR
AND MYSTERY
US publication: 1925 (George H. Doran)
Detective:
Plot summary and comments: Contains 8 short stories from Round the Fire Stories, and 5 from other collections.
THE CAPTAIN OF THE POLESTAR AND OTHER TALES
UK publication: 1890 (Longmans)
US publication: 1894 (Munro)
Detective: Various
Plot summary and comments: Contains mostly thrillers, with a couple of crime stories, or stories of mysterious secrets eventually explained. The stories are: The Captain of the Pole-Star (a ghost story on shipboard); J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement (a thriller involving mutiny and an African kingdom); The Great Kleinplatz Experiment (a comedy about mesmerism); The Man from Archangel (a mysterious woman survives a shipwreck); That Little Square Box (a "joke" story with a surprise ending); John Huxford's Hiatus (sentimental); A Literary Mosaic (Cyprian Overbeck Wells) (a comedy with parodies of English writers); John Barrington Cowles (a thriller about a fiendish but beautiful woman); Elias B. Hopkins, The Parson of Jackman's Gulch (comedy set in an Australian mining camp); The Ring of Thoth (mystery/thriller dealing with ancient Egypt).
DANGER! AND OTHER STORIES
UK publication: 1918 (John Murray)
US publication: 1919 (George H. Doran)
Detective: Various
Plot summary and comments: A collection of 10 short stories, only two of which could be called mysteries, and all extremely dated. By title the stories are: Danger! (an account of a war against Britain in which the island is starved into submission by submarine attack on merchant ships; written just before World War I and intended as a warning); One Crowded Hour (a meticulous account of an hour's banditry on a Sussex road); A Point of View (not a story at all, but a defense of the English servant class); The Fall of Lord Barrymore (a bully receives his comeuppance); The Horror of the Heights (a strange tale of monsters inhabiting the upper atmosphere and terrorizing airplanes that reach them); Borrowed Scenes (evidently a satire of George Borrow); The Surgeon of Gaster Fell (a mysterious story about a man living in isolation on the moors); How It Happened (a short account of a motoring accident); The Prisoner's Defence (a first-person story of the background to a crime); Three of Them (several uncharacteristically sentimental episodes in the playtimes of three young children).
THE GREEN FLAG AND OTHER STORIES OF WAR
AND SPORT
UK publication: 1900 (Smith)
US publication: 1900 (McClure)
Detective:
Plot summary and comments: Short stories, some criminous.
MYSTERIES AND ADVENTURES
Alternative title: THE GULLY OF BLUEMANSDYKE
UK publication: 1889 (Walter Scott)
Detective:
Plot summary and comments: A volume of early stories, some criminous, written by Doyle as a young man and published in London Society. The copyright was claimed by the magazine's publisher, Hogg, and after Doyle became famous, Hogg brought out the volume behind Doyle's back. Doyle was bitterly angry about his "youthful effusions" being set before the public without his consent.
MY FRIEND THE MURDERER AND OTHER MYSTERIES
AND ADVENTURES
US publication: 1893 (Lovell and Coryell)
Detective:
Plot summary and comments: A 'pirated' American edition of stories written for the journal London Society in Doyle's early days; the publisher, Hogg, represented himself as owning copyright on the stories and sold them to the U.S. publisher without Doyle's knowledge, after Doyle had become famous. Doyle was furious that his juvenilia had been released without his consent, but he had no recourse. The stories are the same as those contained in Mysteries and Adventures, published in the UK, with four additional ones.
ROUND THE FIRE STORIES
UK publication: 1908 (Smith Elder)
Detective:
Plot summary and comments:
ROUND THE RED LAMP
UK publication: 1894 (Methuen)
US publication: 1894 (Appleton)
Detective: Various
Plot summary and comments: 13 short stories dealing
with the medical profession, of which one or two could be called
mysteries. Doyle meant the collection (subtitled "Facts and
Fancies of Medical Life") to be a mixture of the cheerful
and the gruesome, which he defends in his preface. Stories by
title: Behind the Times (a meditation on the virtues of
an old-fashioned doctor); His First Operation (a medical
student embarrasses himself witnessing surgery); A Straggler
of '15 (a patriotic and sentimental story about the last days
of a 90-year-old survivor of Waterloo); The Third Generation
(thriller; a young baronet finds he has a hereditary disease on
the eve of his marriage); A False Start (a struggling doctor
is rewarded for acting according to his conscience); The Curse
of Eve (melodramatic account of a husband waiting out a confinement);
Sweethearts (sentimental--an elderly couple still in love);
A Physiologist's Wife (love comes to an agnostic man of
science); The Case of Lady Sannox (a cheated husband's
gruesome revenge); A Question of Diplomacy (the Foreign
Minister is outflanked at home by his wife); A Medical Document
(doctors tell their fireside tales--Doyle invokes the camaraderie
of the medical profession); Lot no. 249 (a thriller/mystery
at Oxford, in which a series of violent attacks on undergraduates
are linked to a mysterious student who keeps a mummy); The
Los Amigos Fiasco (joke story about a man given new life by
electric shock).
TALES OF TERROR AND MYSTERY
UK publication: 1922 (John Murray)
US publication: ?1977 (Doubleday)
Detective:
Plot summary and comments: 13 short stories, mostly reprinted from other collections. The modern American publication appears to be the same as the UK collection of 1922. The stories are subdivided into "Tales of Terror" and "Tales of Mystery", which are self-explanatory; the mystery stories are clever, but without the human interest that characterizes the Holmes stories. Titles in the first group: The Horror of the Heights (also published in Danger!--monsters that terrorize airplanes); The Leather Funnel (a macabre artefact causes dreams of a 17th-century torture scene); The New Catacomb (an English archaeologist puts himself in the power of his rival); The Case of Lady Sannox (also published in Round the Red Lamp--a cheated husband's revenge); The Terror of Blue John Gap (an encounter with a cave-dwelling monster); The Brazilian Cat (a penniless aristocrat is lured into danger by a relative who keeps a menagerie). Titles in the second group: The Lost Special (a train vanishes without trace between two stations); The Beetle-Hunter (a beginning doctor is employed on a strange errand to a coleopterist); The Man with the Watches (three people disappear from a railway carriage en route, and a man is found dead); The Japanned Box (mysterious voices from a reclusive nobleman's study); The Black Doctor (an apparently murdered doctor of foreign extraction reappears during the trial); The Jew's Breastplate (priceless antique jewels are stolen from a museum); The Nightmare Room (melodrama with a surprise ending).
UNCOLLECTED STORIES: THE UNKNOWN CONAN
DOYLE
UK publication: 1982 (Secker and Warburg)
US publication: 1982 (Doubleday)
Detective:
Plot summary and comments: A gathering of 33 stories published in magazines, mainly in Doyle's younger days, and including his first story ever. Most are thriller/mysteries.