Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Illustrated Novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Match wits with the razor-sharp mind and keenly honed instincts of literature's most famous detective. Every one of the immortal Sherlock Holmes novels appears in this single volume, unabridged, embellished with the beautiful original illustrations, and reasonably priced. The classic works include:
A Study in Scarlet: the very first Holmes adventure--and the start of a beautiful friendship between the detective and Dr. Watson.
The Sign of Four: Holmes is called upon to solve the case of a missing treasure in India.
The Hound of the Baskervilles: Holmes and Watson find themselves involved in an age-old curse.
The Valley of Fear: A cipher message. A grisly murder. A dark and powerful tale.with a battle between Holmes and his infamous nemesis, Professor Moriarty.

I was rather surprised to discover that the complete illustrated novels amounted only to four. Perhaps the other novels were not illustrated? Or, from the very small amount of research I've done, it seems that all the others were short stories, as opposed to novel-length books. Anyway, on to the books - in case you can't read it off the picture, the four novels are: A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear. The first two novels were not very good, in my opinion. The first one suffered from being, not only the first Sherlock Holmes story, but from [apparently] being the first in the murder mystery genre. Either way I did not enjoy them. They seemed somewhat far-fetched and contrived - after all, what on earth is the whole mormon sub-plot necessary for? He did a similar thing in The Valley of Fear, but that was far more interesting and seemed less out-of-step with the novel. The Sign of Four had a similar problem to the first one - there was no possible way for you to work out anything. The first time that you were introduced to half the clues, was when Holmes was explaining to you what had happened. The last two novels in the set were far more enjoyable, for the simple reason that you were shown all these enigmatic tidbits and could actually figure one or two things out. Of course, they might've been a lot more enjoyable if I actually liked any of the characters...

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