“The Problem of the Coptic Patriarchs” (a reference to one of Holmes's unrecorded cases from the canonical “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”), Inspector Lestrade of the Yard arrives at Baker Street to inform Holmes that the rare and priceless 10th-century Alexandrian Scroll has been stolen and Father Philoxenus of the London Coptic Patriarchate has been kidnapped and ransomed. In uncovering a web of police corruption and malpractice, they are perplexed by the enigmatic genealogy of the victim and encounter more than one miscarriage of justice. Their peregrinations take them into some of the lowest quarters of the city, peopled by shady underworld characters such as “The Moudie”, “Cauld Kale”, and “The Acrobat”. In “The Adventure of the Sixty Steps”, Holmes and Watson travel to Glasgow in an attempt to save an innocent man-who has been wrongly convicted of the brutal murder of a rich elderly spinster-from the gallows. These macabre clues lead them to some of Victorian London’s queerest places, and to one of its most bizarre institutions (which Holmes describes as “a citadel of the mad and the dead”). In a London mired in thick November fog, their footsteps are dogged by a silent unseen adversary as they follow a series of cryptograms which they must decipher. In “The Mystery of the Thirteen Bells”, Holmes and Watson, along with Inspector Lestrade, are involved in a grisly treasure hunt of a murder.
The trail eventually leads back to London and to crimes committed, but unavenged, from Holmes’s past. Holmes and Watson are immediately confronted with the sudden, and ominous, disappearance of the two witnesses to the murder-an elderly widow and her traveling companion. “The Tragedy of Langhorne Wyke” sees the detective and his chronicler travel to Yorkshire's North Riding to solve the double murder of a well-heeled but mysterious couple. 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). Holmes is a man of many facets, and I do not share the common perception of Holmes as cold and humourless: his sense of fun can be sparkling, and there are moments of rare pathos.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. However, his extraordinary powers of deduction generally solve the mystery, often to the discomfiture of the official police force. There is not always a crime committed nor a culprit to find, and when there is, Holmes does not invariably get his man. These were the first Sherlock Holmes short stories, originally published as single stories in the Strand Magazine: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes audio book is a collection of twelve stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, featuring the world’s most famous detective.
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