Below is the complete list of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Sherlock Holmes Books
Publication Order of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Books
Publication Order of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Books
- The Adventure of Silver Blaze (1892)
The Adventure of Silver Blaze was published in 1892 and is listed as book #1 in the The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes series. 
- The Adventure of the Yellow Face (1893)
The Adventure of the Yellow Face is a 1893 release and appears as book #3 in the The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes series. 
Publication Order of The Return of Sherlock Holmes Books
- The Adventure of the Dancing Men (1903)
The Adventure of the Dancing Men is a 1903 release and appears as book #3 in the The Return of Sherlock Holmes series. - The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist (1904)
In the The Return of Sherlock Holmes series, The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist is book #4 and was published in 1904. - The Adventure of the Priory School (1904)
The Adventure of the Priory School was first published in 1904; within the The Return of Sherlock Holmes series, it is listed as book #5. 
- The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton (1904)
Published in 1904, The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton is listed as book #7 in the The Return of Sherlock Holmes series. - The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez (1904)
The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez was first published in 1904; within the The Return of Sherlock Holmes series, it is listed as book #10.
Publication Order of Sherlock Holmes – His Last Bow Books
- The Adventure of the Red Circle (1911)
In the Sherlock Holmes – His Last Bow series, The Adventure of the Red Circle is book #4 and was published in 1911. 
Publication Order of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes Books
Publication Order of Sherlock Holmes Short Story Collections Books
- The Complete Sherlock Holmes (1927)
The Complete Sherlock Holmes was published in 1927 and is listed as book #6 in the Sherlock Holmes Short Story Collections series. - The Collected Sherlock Holmes Short Stories (1927)
Published in 1927, The Collected Sherlock Holmes Short Stories is listed as book #7 in the Sherlock Holmes Short Story Collections series. 
- Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume One (1985)
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume One was first published in 1985; within the Sherlock Holmes Short Story Collections series, it is listed as book #10. 
- Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume Three (1986)
Published in 1986, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume Three is listed as book #12 in the Sherlock Holmes Short Story Collections series. 
About Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series is the foundation of modern detective fiction: four novels and fifty-six short stories centered on the brilliant consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his friend, narrator, and chronicler Dr. John H. Watson. The sequence began with A Study in Scarlet in 1887 and developed into a body of work now commonly known as the Sherlock Holmes canon. Its importance lies not only in the mysteries themselves, but in the complete imaginative structure Doyle created: Baker Street rooms, strange clients, physical clues, disguises, deductions, London fog, professional rivalry, and the steady voice of Watson turning Holmes’s methods into story.
Holmes is introduced in A Study in Scarlet as a strange, intensely rational figure whose powers of observation make ordinary life appear newly legible. Watson, recently returned from military service in Afghanistan, becomes his housemate at 221B Baker Street and gradually the reader’s guide into Holmes’s work. Their partnership is the emotional and structural center of the series. Holmes supplies brilliance, cold focus, impatience, and theatricality; Watson supplies warmth, loyalty, moral response, and narrative shape. Without Watson, Holmes would be a phenomenon. Through Watson, he becomes a character.
The early novels establish different sides of Doyle’s method. A Study in Scarlet introduces the detective and the logic of deduction, while The Sign of Four develops the partnership through a treasure mystery, imperial history, and Watson’s romance with Mary Morstan. The short stories then made Holmes a phenomenon. Collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, they gave readers compact, memorable cases such as “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Red-Headed League,” “The Speckled Band,” and “Silver Blaze.” The shorter form suited Holmes perfectly because each case could turn on one vivid premise, one overlooked fact, or one strange human motive.
Doyle famously tried to end the series in “The Final Problem,” where Holmes confronts Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Moriarty’s role in the canon is smaller than his later cultural reputation might suggest, but his symbolic importance is enormous: he gives Holmes an intellectual equal and allows Doyle to imagine detection as a final duel between opposing kinds of genius. Public demand eventually brought Holmes back, first through The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is set before Reichenbach, and then through “The Adventure of the Empty House,” which explains his survival and opens the stories collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
Publication order is useful because it preserves the way readers first experienced Holmes’s apparent death, absence, and return. Internal chronology is not always straightforward, and several stories are retrospective, but the published sequence shows Doyle’s changing relationship with the character. The later collections—His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes—carry Holmes into a more modern world, with shifting tones and occasional darker edges, while still relying on the essential pleasures of clue, deduction, and revelation.
The Holmes stories are often remembered for logic, but they are not merely exercises in puzzle-solving. Doyle’s mysteries move through class anxiety, inheritance, marriage, blackmail, colonial history, professional disgrace, secret societies, domestic violence, greed, jealousy, and revenge. Holmes’s deductions may seem almost superhuman, yet the crimes themselves usually come from recognizably human pressure. That balance is why the series endures: the method is dazzling, but the motives remain intimate.
Sherlock Holmes has been adapted and reimagined countless times, but the original books retain a particular sharpness. They are brisk, atmospheric, and often stranger than their reputation for pure rationality suggests. At their best, they make the world feel charged with evidence, as if every footprint, ash mark, telegram, sleeve, dog bark, or silence might be waiting for the right mind to read it.