Why Sherlock Feels Most at Home in Shorter Forms
When most people think of Sherlock Holmes, they think of novels like The Hound of the Baskervilles. But the truth is, Holmes was never really a novelist’s detective. His natural home was always the short story, and by extension, the anthology.
Holmes and The Strand
Arthur Conan Doyle made Holmes a household name not with a novel, but with a series of short stories in The Strand Magazine. Beginning in 1891 with A Scandal in Bohemia, the formula was set; a crisp mystery, solved in twenty pages, narrated by Watson with just the right blend of admiration and doubt.
Readers could pick up a magazine on the train, enjoy a case in a single sitting, and then wait eagerly for the next month’s instalment. It was Victorian binge-reading.
When collected, these stories became anthologies: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs, The Return, His Last Bow. The format itself shaped how readers thought of Holmes — not as a sprawling, novel-length hero, but as someone you met again and again in brief, concentrated encounters.
The Novella Middle Ground
Doyle did, of course, write Holmes at longer length: A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Valley of Fear. But even these don’t quite feel like today’s crime novels. At 40–60,000 words, they’re really novellas by modern standards.
They are long enough to build atmosphere (think of the moor in Hound), but still far shorter than a contemporary crime novel, which often runs to 90,000 words or more. Doyle never padded Holmes, his cases were lean, focused, and atmospheric.
Why Anthologies Fit
For modern Sherlockians, this matters. We don’t just love Holmes because of the big set pieces; we love him because of the rhythm of the short story. Each new tale feels like a fresh visit to Baker Street.
That’s why anthologies work so well for Holmes today. They honour the format readers expect: brief encounters, atmospheric puzzles, and the sense of dipping in and out of Holmes’s world rather than being trapped in it for weeks.
My Own Experience
When I wrote Footsteps on the Moor, it came in at around 12,000 words, a tidy novella, running just over an hour in audio. Writing it felt natural, as if I were stepping into Doyle’s footsteps. Enough space to build tension, but not so much that the story sagged.
I’ve since written a longer work, about 44,500 words, and while I enjoyed the challenge, I’m not sure I’ll always want to write Holmes at that length. For me, the novella and the anthology format feel like home. They let me explore ideas fully, but still keep Holmes true to his origins.
Always a Detective of Brief Encounters
Perhaps that’s why, more than a century later, Holmes continues to thrive in anthologies. Doyle gave us 56 short stories; pastiche writers have given us hundreds more. Together they remind us that Holmes is best enjoyed in bursts, a case here, a puzzle there, always returning us to the warmth of 221B.
Holmes was, and remains, an anthology detective.