Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893, in the short story `The Final Problem`, but was tempted to bring him back to life ten years later, in the thirteen tales that comprise The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

While the outcry that supposedly followed Holmes` death was mostly apocryphal (the claim that readers wore black armbands in mourning has been frequently cited but never actually proved), by 1893 there was a substantial readership for Holmes` two series of adventures published in the Strand Magazine and two earlier novels. Doyle returned to Holmes in 1901-2 with The Hound of the Baskervilles, a novel set before the events of `The Final Problem`; the commercial success of the serialisation in the Strand led Doyle to consider reviving the Holmes stories on a longer-term basis. Accordingly, in 1903 Doyle was contracted by the American magazine Collier`s Weekly to supply six more Holmes stories; the agreement was extended to six more, with a final extension for a thirteenth story (`The Second Stain`) that Doyle (mistakenly) believed to be the closing episode of the Holmes adventures. These thirteen tales make up this volume