The Adventure of the Empty House, one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by 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' appetites.Doyle ranked "The Adventure of the Empty House" sixth in his list of his twelve favorite Holmes stories.The story takes place in 1894, three years after the death of Sherlock Holmes. On the night of March 30, an apparently unsolvable locked-room murder takes place in London: the Park Lane Mystery, the killing of the Honourable Ronald Adair, son of the Earl of Maynooth, a colonial governor in Australia. He was in his sitting room, working on accounts of some kind, as indicated by the papers and money found by police. Adair liked playing whist and regularly did so at several clubs, but never for great sums of money. It does, however, come out that he won as much as £420 in partnership with Colonel Sebastian Moran. The motive does not appear to be robbery as nothing has been stolen, and it seems that Adair had not an enemy in the world. It seems odd that Ronald's door was locked from the inside. The only other way out was the open window, and there was a 20-foot (about 6 m) drop below it onto a flower bed, which now shows no sign of being disturbed. Adair was killed with a soft-nosed revolver bullet to the head. No one in the area at the time heard a shot...Famous works of the author Arthur Conan Doyle: A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Valley of Fear, His Last Bow, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, Stories of Sherlock Holmes, The Lost World.
1The Adventure of the Empty House - Opening credits
2The Adventure of the Empty House
3The Adventure of the Empty House - Closing credits
About the author
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle wurde am 22.5.1859 in Edinburgh/Schottland geboren. Sein Vater stammte aus einer aristokratischen irischen Familie. Doyle studierte an der Universität Edinburgh Medizin. Um sein Studium finanzieren zu können, begann er 1879 mit der Schriftstellerei. 1885 wurde ihm der Doktortitel verliehen. Es ist naheliegend, das Doyle als praktischer Arzt und Mediziner in der fiktiven Figur des Doktor Watson sein Alter Ego erschuf.View all by Arthur Conan Doyle
