My goodness

Classic Sherlock Homes, but some of the stories are extremely pat. There are some good ones: the Six Napoleons, Charles Augustus Milverton, and The Golden Pince-Nez.

Some are adventure yarns and hardly any Sherlocking. And most suffer from contrived circumstances.

Holmes lets a couple criminals off the hook, which doesn't seem very Victorian. But what can you do. Holmes doesn't give a shit. Holmes does what he wants.

I can tell Doyle is phoning it in. He's bored with Holmes and it sorta shows.

 “The Return of Sherlock Holmes,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, might be one of my favorite collections from the case files of the great detective. 

I particularly enjoyed this volume of tales because not every mystery was a murder. In some cases, while a murder may have occurred, that crime was not always the central focus of the investigation. I found this refreshing because while the official investigators were invariably distracted by the obvious, Holmes could instead follow the more subtle and less conspicuous threads to discover the real crime. This nuanced subilty offered up a collection of tales that were creative and more difficult to solve as a reader. 
 
There were also several cases in which Holmes did not report the perpetrator of the crime, but he instead chose to let them go free because they were (in his opinion) on the right side of justice. Holmes can make choices in how much he tells the police because he is an independent contractor. 

This interesting character trait of choosing to sometimes side with the perp instead of automatically defaulting to following the letter of the law gives Holmes a streak of compassion--coupled with a feeling that his behavior may be unpredictable-- and that makes him decidedly human. 

I once had someone try to explain to me moral alignments from the game, “Dungeons and Dragons,” by briefly outlining the various moral positions a player can have. There are 9 moral alignments.
I'm not going to describe all the alignments since most of them don't apply, but I will say that I am struggling to decide if Holmes has a moral alignment of lawful good or chaotic good. 

As far as I understand it, lawful good involves following the law completely as it is written. Chaotic good is when you follow the law as you interpret it and then apply it as is required. 

I think that the moral alignment of the great detective is open to debate, but I believe that he chose to be an independent contractor so that he would be free to follow his own ideas of justice. 

There is even a story in this collection where he assigns Watson the task of jury, and he designates himself a judge, and they hold a mock trial and set a murderer free after concluding the murder was a justifiable homicide.

In another story, a student jeopardized an exam tied to a lucrative scholarship--the exposure of which would be a great scandal—Holmes instructs Watson and another character to arrange themselves into several armchairs with the intent of forming “a small private court-martial.” 

Given the evidence, I personally believe that Holmes is a chaotic good character.

That he is good is a fact. Whether he is lawful or chaotic is up for debate. 

On an individual level, I found this collection of tales to be refreshing and fun to read. The only trouble I had was that I started reading it on my Kindle—this being the third book I have tried to read on that thing. Every time I’ve started reading anything on the Kindle, about halfway through the book some paranoid thoughts begin to call out to me from the back of my brain saying that the book isn’t being read legitimately because I’m not reading it in book form.
 
 I fight this paranoid idea for some time before I eventually fold and seek out the book I’m reading in physical form. Then, once I have obtained a copy of the “real” book, I have to start reading all over again from the beginning. 

I did this with “The Three Musketeers,” reading about half of the book on the Kindle before starting all over again and instead reading a physical copy I got from the library. 

I read, “The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” on the Kindle because I had nothing else to read while on vacation and only accidentally finished the digital version of the book because Amazon was so slow to deliver a physical copy. I have marked the stories as having been read on Goodreads—but in my heart I feel like that is a lie. I feel I need to read the actual book to count it as having been truly read. 

The same thing happened with “The Return of Sherlock Holmes.” I read half of the book on the Kindle and then started over again from the beginning with a physical copy. That’s why it took such a long time for me to read this collection of short stories. 

In general, “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” should be a fun and easy read. You should breeze through this book at a rapid clip. There is no reason for this book to take a long time to read unless you are insane, such as I am, and must begin again at the beginning if you so much as question the authenticity of your book’s format. 

I know that I am paranoid, but that Kindle makes me nervous, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to accept it. 

So far, I think it's been my favorite of the Sherlock series, despite the whole "Return" part. Sadly, my eReader version didn't include the pictures (maps, sketches, dancing men), but it was enjoyable none the less.

Another collection of variable quality, although the female characters in these stories are largely wonderful, and a handful are kickass, self-sufficient women.

Also, the canon support for a Holmes/Watson marriage is all over the place and nothing like subtle, but all in all there's relatively little of Watson in the book. He's narrating every page and he's present in all those scenes, but it seems like earlier books had more of him expressing his own self. The bits and pieces of them sniping at each other make me so fond because it's all too rare that we see that Watson is entirely able to hold his own next to Holmes, but he's self-censoring as narrator. Such interesting characterization. It makes him a great ninja of an unreliable narrator because ACD takes such pains to convince us that Watson is impeccably reliable. And yet... *g*

I wish he'd written more novels.

One more collection down! I found this set of stories more consistently satisfying than the previous short story collections. On the whole, these stories did a better job of showing Holmes getting out and investigating, rather than just listening to client's stories then disappearing for a while, only to pop up and narrate his investigations later. Less talky, more walky :)