The Adventure of the Empty House, one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 13 stories in the cycle collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Public pressure forced Conan Doyle to bring the sleuth back to life, and explain his apparently miraculous survival of a deadly struggle with Professor Moriarty.
This is the first Holmes story set after his supposed death at the Reichenbach Fal...
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The Adventure of the Empty House, one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 13 stories in the cycle collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Public pressure forced Conan Doyle to bring the sleuth back to life, and explain his apparently miraculous survival of a deadly struggle with Professor Moriarty.
This is the first Holmes story set after his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls, as recounted in "The Final Problem". The Hound of the Baskervilles had seen the return of a pre-Reichenbach Falls Sherlock Holmes, which only served to whet readers' hunger.
The story itself begins, typically enough, with a murder—the Park Lane Mystery, the seemingly motiveless killing of Mr. Ronald Adair, son of the Earl of Maynooth, a high colonial official in Australia. The authorities, not to mention the man's family, are perplexed by the case: it seems that the Honourable Ronald Adair had not an enemy in the world. He was in his...
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