The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes collects the final twelve of the fifty-six Holmes stories, all of which had been printed in the Strand Magazine across those years. John Murray brought the book out in Britain in June 1927, and George H. Doran published it in the United States in the same month.

The two first editions differ in small ways, including the punctuation of the title: the British one hyphenated Case-Book, while the American one ran the words separately. Later publishers have sometimes issued it as The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. The stories are not printed in the order in which they first appeared, so the volume reads as a gathering rather than a sequence.

Two of the twelve, The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place and The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger, were the last of Doyle's Holmes writing to remain under copyright in the United States, and the two of them passed into the public domain at the start of 2023. In Britain, Canada and Australia those rights had ended in 1981, were revived in the United Kingdom in 1995 and expired again at the start of 2001. A 2013 case in an Illinois court turned on whether the characters of Holmes and Watson could still be protected even where no story was, and the estate lost it.