More tales from the dispatch box of Doctor John Watson. These 10 stories have appeared previously in various volumes of The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories and other anthologies. They come together as a collection for the first time.

Why Meiringen? Sherlock Holmes fans have always asked why did Holmes go to Meiringen? And did Moriarty follow him there? And if Holmes did not die in the Falls, what happened next? The familiar stories tell us little. For the first time, this book gives us the answers we've always wanted.

Set in late January and early February of 1891, during the time that Professor Moriarty declares in The Final Problem that Holmes had "incommoded" his plans, Holmes and Watson are visited by two charwomen and retained to clear the name of a drunkard lighthouse keeper who has been arrested and charged with the murder of a German man in Tynemouth, England.

A banker finds a photograph of a woman who later appears to him on the street. Could she be leading him to an inexorable appointment with fate? Does she even exist? The Adeptus Exemptus and Imperator of the Esoteric Society of the Roseate Morn is being menaced by a magician with an improbable name. Could there be something to his curse? Can Holmes and a young girl solve an old riddle about her family before the Christmas pudding is served? Who is Cassandra and why was she trying to disgorge a fish from her throat? Join Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as they untangle these mysteries.

Matthew Bartholomew, unorthodox but effective physician to Michaelhouse college in medieval Cambridge, is as worried as anyone about the pestilence that is ravaging Europe and seems to be approaching England. But he is distracted by the sudden and inexplicable death of the Master of Michaelhouse - a death the University authorities do not want investigated.

Sherlock Holmes is a Yorkshireman, born and brought up on the North York Moors, but he spent much of his life at 221B Baker Street in London. He is more than a character from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's imagination. For many thousands of followers, he still lives in their minds through films, television, stage and radio plays, and written stories. Ever since Holmes first appeared in print, people have used the stories, together with knowledge of the culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to speculate about his life. They wanted more than the 60 stories in the Canon.

This is the fourth story from The Art of Sherlock Holmes project and first appeared in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part V.

The apparition of a lady dressed in white and long thought dead, a deadly and shadowy form that wreaks terror on the heath, and a figure from the past who has accrued the power to commune with the dead! Here is collection of cases, some new, together with a few old favorites which sorely test Holmes' long-held beliefs to their very limits!

From some clear pieces of glass and a raven's feather, the great detective must divine exactly who the client was and what prompted him to seek assistance at 221B. Fortunately, Holmes has a number of experts upon whom he can rely as well as his own vast store of esoteric knowledge. Treading a twisted path, Holmes soon finds himself matching wits with an unseen criminal, who appears to be the equal of the late Professor Moriarty. At the same time, he is tasked with sparing the monarchy any possible embarrassment that may stem from the investigation.

In real life, 221B Baker Street is the home of a bank. When fans send letters to Sherlock Holmes, bank employee Addy Zhuang, known as "Sherlock's Secretary," replies. One day, the bank is robbed, but the thieves only take three letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes. The police conclude it was all a harmless prank, but Addy suspects something more malicious is happening.

In The Adventure of the Jeweled Falcon, Holmes tracks down an ancient priceless statue, but others are looking for it too. In The Case of the Violin Savant, using clues found in the sophisticated musical compositions of a celebrated but mute nine-year-old violin savant, Holmes and Watson attempt to discover where and why the boy and his parents vanished. In The Adventure of Stonehenge in London, Holmes and Watson stumble upon a strange structure on the roof of a mansion in London, and somehow it relates to the missing eighth Earl of Rendlesham.

For all we know, or think we know, about Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, what we don’t know is far, far greater. In the duo’s first case, A Study in Scarlet, we learn that Holmes and Watson met on January 1st, 1881, and subsequently moved into an apartment together at 221b Baker Street. Their first case officially began on March 4th of that year, and it is argued that “The Adventure of the Resident Patient” possibly took place in October of 1881, depending on which version of the story you read. But what happened during the rest of 1881? Or all of 1882?

Did you ever wonder where Sherlock Holmes found the Persian slipper he keeps his shag tobacco in? Had Holmes and Watson ever met before that day at St. Barts? Did Holmes really believe in curses when he said he did? Dr. John Watson reveals the answers to these questions in The Persian Slipper and Other Stories, along with cases involving the putative Naval Man, a night spent at a gentlemen’s club, Holmes’ second marriage proposal, a movable tree, and a surprising wedding ending.

Séamas Duffy’s fourth novel, Sherlock Holmes and the Sixty Steps, follows a similar format to his previously published Holmes collections: a novella together with some shorter stories. The four stories are: “The Tragedy of Langhorne Wyke” (1890); “The Mystery of the Thirteen Bells” (1895); “The Adventure of the Sixty Steps” (1897); and “The Problem of the Coptic Patriarchs” (1898).

In the year 1903 - the exact moment is now lost to history - Sherlock Holmes proclaimed to the world he was quitting England's Capital to go into retirement on a small, wind-swept farm in the Sussex South Downs. His shocked comrade-in-arms Dr. John H. Watson was later to write, "The decision took me utterly by surprise. I thought I had become an institution around Holmes, like his Stradivarius, or the old, oily black clay pipe and his index books."